The Gold Album:

It was March twenty-sixth. Winnie was neck deep in her scrapbooks. George recognized the ones she chose to revisit today: only the ones from before Bucky started high school. The ones from before cancer. She almost always looked at them on this anniversary. This year felt different, though. Fifteen years since the surgery meant Bucky had now lived without his arm for as long as he'd lived with it. That was an occasion worth grieving. George sat down beside his wife to grieve with her.

The scrapbook was open on a black and white picture–it wasn't that old, she just had a phase where he wanted to document in black and white for "nostalgia." Baby Bucky had his left hand wrapped around Winnie's index finger.

"Do you remember the first time he did that to you?" Winnie asked.

George smiled, remembering the sensation. "Yes."

"It was the most magical feeling."

She turned the page. This one featured two photos of her and a slightly older Bucky, now in color. One showed them face-to-face, Winnie about to kiss his little forehead. In the other, Bucky stared at the camera and sported all of two teeth, his little fist resting on Winnie's chest. George could tell Winnie was only looking at him, but he also admired his beautiful wife. Her hair was permed for one of the photos, but straight in the other, and she looked absolutely gorgeous both ways.

"When I look at these, I remember how it felt," she said, sniffling. "To hold his little body and feel it against mine."

"Me too." God, where did the time go?

They flipped through the rest of the album, treasuring each little snapshot in the life of their family. "I can't believe he used to be so blonde," George chuckled. As a baby, his hair was even lighter than Winnie's, but it turned dark when he was four or five.

"Remember that Christmas we spent in Wisconsin with your family?" she asked when they reached a picture from that trip. Bucky, wearing an oversized white sweater, baggy jeans, and boots sat on the sofa with a phone to his ear. Off to the side sat a giant inflatable soccer ball that had been his favorite present that year.

"He loved that old phone," George said.

"He kept trying to call Santa to thank him for the presents."

The next page featured Bucky with his arms around Winnie and his cheek pressed against hers. Around his left wrist was a little red watch.

"This is one of my favorites." Just looking at it made George smile.

Once they got past age four, a second thread of grief wove its way in. Most of these pictures included Steve. He'd been gone four years.

"This is also one of my favorites," George said. Bucky had the biggest grin on his face, so big it looked like his eyes were closed.

"Look at this knobby little knee," Winnie said, pointing to the leg of another kid whose face wasn't in the picture. It was clear his arm was around Bucky, though. Definitely Steve. George didn't remember why he wasn't fully in the picture.

"God, he was so skinny." Winnie shook her head and laughed. "Every time he was at our house, I felt like I needed to get a cheeseburger or two in him."

George laughed along. "Yeah." While most of their lives, Bucky had been the taller and sturdier of the two, George vividly remembered the first time he saw the two together and realized Bucky was just as gaunt. He'd always been slim from soccer–slim but strong. But once he started chemo, weight just fell off of him. It was terrifying to witness. Bucky fought constantly to minimize his losses, a battle which continued long after chemo ended.

"I think we should look at the gold album," he suggested.

Winnie's voice shook. "I…I don't want to."

"I want to. Will you look at them with me?"

She agreed. George gathered up the albums, returned them to the cabinet, and fetched the gold album. It was the smallest in Winnie's collection, and the hardest to look at. George sat down, wrapped his arm around Winnie, and laid the album on both their laps. Winnie's hand shook as she reached to open it.

The first picture was from before Bucky's first bone scan, while he was getting the radioactive tracer infused. Winnie hadn't taken any during the diagnosis process, too afraid and distracted to document anything. Bucky was on his phone, with an IV in his left elbow, and visibly annoyed that Winnie had decided to take a picture. The next showed him in the soccer ball beanie his friends bought, though still with a full head of hair beneath it.

"It really was too long," Winnie remarked.

There were pictures from Thanksgiving, of Bucky's newly-shaved head. By the next page, even the fuzz that remained after Steve buzzed it was gone. So were his eyebrows and some of the fullness in his cheeks. Then came Christmas pictures. Bucky in a snowman beanie sucking on a candy cane with the casual air of a cowboy with a toothpick. Him wearing the shirt that read, "It cost an arm and a leg but I was able to negotiate," though at that point he still had two. George remembered buying that shirt with Winnie. They got a medium, which was what Bucky usually wore at that age. It hung off of him, but his smile was bright and genuine.

There wasn't much from the next two months. A few shots of Bucky in hospital beds or posing with his friends. Many of those had been taken by other Gravesen kids and Winnie had Bucky send them to her so she could print them. Making this scrapbook had been incredibly hard for her, but her therapist recommended it to help process the trauma of those months.

They reached March. There were two pictures side by side. Bucky hugging Winnie, and Bucky hugging George. He wanted to hug them one last time, but it was Winnie who insisted on pictures. Bucky's left arm was littered in signatures from his friends, a remnant of their earlier farewell celebration. Winnie shed a few tears remembering that moment. George reached for the corner of the page, but Winnie laid her hand over his to stop him.

"Is it terrible that I miss this so much? When he was whole?"

George rubbed her back. "No, not at all. It's a loss you are allowed to grieve. Bucky would tell you the same thing."

"It seems so ungrateful to grieve an arm when Sarah and Joseph and Edith and Harry and Liz and so many more lost their entire child."

"You are not ungrateful. We talk all the time about how grateful we are to have him here."

She sniffled. "You're right." She sniffled a few more times before announcing, "I'm ready."

George turned the page.

Bucky had given them permission to take post-surgery pictures before they took him away. George had taken the first few; Winnie's hands were too shaky. He took one just a few minutes after they were brought to see him. Bucky was ashen, still on oxygen while the anesthetic wore off, and–most notably–down an arm. George remembered the surgeon showing them on a drawing and on Bucky himself where they'd be cutting, but none of that adequately prepared him to see his son disfigured like that. Both he and Winnie had cried. About an hour later, they'd moved him to his room and taken away the oxygen. Winnie had held his hand until he woke up, and George had vacantly watched blood drain from a tube buried in Bucky's left flank.

Per Bucky's request, they took lots of pictures of the stump as it healed. The first showed only bandages and the drain, but the next, taken during his first bandage change/infection check, showed everything. Forty six stitches (a number Bucky liked to boast) snaked along his clavicle and down what once was the point of his shoulder, continuing towards his back and all the way down to his fifth or sixth rib. A few inches below the last stitch, the drain disappeared through a hole in his skin. It looked unimaginably painful, but Bucky always said the drugs took care of it and the phantom pain was all that bothered him. George found that hard to believe.

What followed was a series of progress photos for the incision healing, interspersed with some of Bucky at physio. They also had a photo of his first time he stood up. At the time, the shape of him had been so unfamiliar that George remembered grimacing through a fake smile when Bucky looked to him to celebrate getting back on his feet. Bucky's smile was genuine, though, even with five different tubes and wires from all across his upper body chaining him to the IV pole.

After all the hospital pictures came another of him in that shirt. Only now that he'd lost the arm and even more weight, it completely dwarfed him. The left side hung so low the words on the front looked like they'd been scrawled sideways. But Bucky was laughing.

The last few pages of the book contained another picture from a tracer infusion, this one for his scans right after chemo ended, which paralleled the first photo in the book. There was also one from his cancer free party. "See? That was cathartic," George said as they closed the book. He found that the more often he looked at these, the less often he got stuck reliving these moments in his head. He knew the same applied to Winnie.

"It was," she admitted. "Thank you for making me."

George kissed her on the cheek. "You're welcome."

"I can't believe this was fifteen years ago."

"That's a long time."

"Feels like yesterday."

"I know."

"We should call Bucky. Maybe see if he wants to go to dinner for his Stump-iversary."

"That's a great idea."

Yes, all of the baby pictures I described here are actual baby pictures of Sebastian Stan that he's posted.