Quondam: Belonging to some time long past; once but no longer
It is a brisk weekend in early Autumn when Steve takes Bucky to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. He keeps careful track of his face as they enter the museum, notes the shell-shocked stare blanking over Bucky's eyes as they look up through the stairwell, framed photographs taking up every available inch of wall space.
"Really?" Bucky whispers, leaning against the railing of the third floor catwalk and reaching out as though he can touch the people in the photographs. People who have long since died, people who have long since faded away into the recesses of distant memory. Steve once spent an entire day here, from opening until the security guard came up and kindly told him that they were closing the museum for the night and he really would have to go, sorry, but it was just company policy. He'd spent the entire afternoon leaning against the railing of the catwalk, exactly like Bucky was doing now, berating himself over and over again, wondering if just maybe there had been a chance to save the girl in the checked dress, the mother carrying a squirming baby, the group of young men gathered around a wheelbarrow and laughing up at the camera. "All of these people are...dead?"
"Yeah," Steve says, cupping his face in his palms and looking at Bucky from the corner of his eye. He's gone over the information and statistics hundreds, thousands of times in his head, but it doesn't make physically saying it any easier.
He takes Bucky around to the lower floors of the museum, where Bucky presses his hands against the glass and looks up at the old Captain America uniform, looking for all the world like an overeager child.
"This is yours," he says, haltingly. "I...remember it." He squints up at the blue material, beginning to fade and tearing at the cuffs. "Doesn't look quite so good as it did then, I guess."
Steve smiles, places a comforting hand in the hollow of Bucky's back. "It's ancient," he says.
"Kind of like us," Bucky murmurs, and Steve rolls his eyes, forced to remember that Bucky is, after all, also approximately 90 years old.
"Yeah, kind of like us," he agrees, and turns to watch the civilians pass by in the reflections of the glass.