Hiraeth: A homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past.
It's like a physical pain deep in the pit of his stomach as Bucky clings to his hand and follows him around Brooklyn, looking around like a lost little puppy.
"It's all so bright," Bucky keeps saying from behind him, and Steve privately has to agree, that's how he felt coming out of the ice for the first time and looking around his old neighbourhood and finding that everything had changed, seemingly overnight. "And there's just...so much." Though Bucky doesn't clarify, Steve knows exactly what he means: The sights, the smells, the sounds are just everywhere, clogging the atmosphere and every available thought, and it's far too much to handle. Steve turns around, ready to wrap Bucky in an embrace, just in case he begins to start breaking down, but he is still looking around in wonder, mouthing the neon words on every storefront to himself.
"Do you remember this?" Steve asks after a while, tugging him down a certain street, past a decrepit movie theater with black-and-white posters hanging listlessly in crooked frames. "Back in the 30s? You remember?"
Bucky stops in the middle of the sidewalk, weeds sprouting around his shoes, squints at a poster for Frankenstein hanging limply in a black frame, its glass scratched and the poster's writing faded.
"We came here before," he says slowly, hesitantly, looking at Steve out of the corner of his eye, as if he is afraid to get the answer wrong. "You and me. Together. Before the war."
Steve smiles, nodding. "And we would sleep over at each other's houses because we were scared of the monster hiding under our beds, coming to get us."
Bucky scoffs, rolls his eyes, a bit of his old sarcasm winding its way through his voice as he remarks, "You must be mistaken about that part. I'm not scared of those things."
"Oh?" Steve asks, quirking an eyebrow at him. "And what exactly is the mighty Winter Soldier scared of?"
Bucky stares at the poster for so hard and for so long that Steve wants to take back his words, stuff them back into his mouth, back into a place where nobody can hear them. "I'm scared of the dark," Bucky says finally, and Steve squeezes his hand in his own in a comforting manner. This admission isn't exactly news to him, but he vividly remembers 1930s Bucky shouting at Steve to hurry up and turn out his nightlight, wasn't he already a big boy, surely he didn't need some stupid little Peter Pan thing to help him sleep. Steve wonders when Bucky started being afraid. Wonders if it will ever stop.
Bucky is the one who drags them away from the theater, down the street, until all Steve can see is the short sloppy ponytail Bucky's tied his hair back in.
Bucky stops so abruptly that Steve runs into his back, extricating himself hastily, apologising, but Bucky isn't listening, staring across the street at a relatively new parking structure that has just recently been sprayed with graffiti.
"This was...home," he says slowly, questioningly, looking over at Steve.
Steve nods, silent, following a short distance behind as Bucky crosses the street, presses his hands against the smooth concrete of the parking structure's columns, pulling his fingers away to find them stained with still-wet paint and dust.
"I'm going to go inside for a while," Bucky says, absentmindedly, rubbing a hand over his face, and Steve is reminded of the first time he saw Bucky in this millennium, masked, teary, face streaked with dirt and blood and motor oil.
"There's just cars in there, you know that, don't you?" Steve asks, but his words fall on deaf ears as Bucky disappears into the darkness of the parking structure, and Steve sighs and braces himself against an iron rail, waiting for Bucky to come out.