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13 hours after
Steve finds himself an abandoned bar and cries for the first time since his mother died. The wreckage, he thinks, is fitting for what has become of his life. He feels ungrounded in a way he never had when Bucky was—
Peggy walks in and it’s a little better, for a moment, but the alcohol still isn’t working and the snow from the mountains still burns in his memory.
5 days after
Reckless, is what Bucky would have called his plan, An unnecessary risk, Steve, but Bucky isn’t here to stop him and so Steve does his best to chase him down—and take as many Nazis with him as he can.
The Arctic Ocean floods the Valkyrie in a rush, but Steve has already closed his eyes. He sees Bucky’s arm outstretched, reaching towards him. Around him are snow, trees, an army tent, their old apartment, a back alley. The freezing water overtakes him and Steve lets himself fall.
66 years after, or 6 days
Steve wakes up and he knows he’s not in heaven because Bucky isn’t with him.
There’s a baseball game on the radio and it’s wrong because he had been there with Bucky and Bucky isn’t with him.
The woman who comes in rings every single warning bell he has and he doesn’t even know why. He thinks the safe thing to do would be to stay and pretend he believes to see what his captors want from him—so he runs.
6 months, 11 days after, or 66 years
He’s living in the honest to God future and all he can think about is how much Bucky would have loved to see what the world had become. He works his way through the dossier of everything he’s missed on his tablet and tries to marvel at the technological advancements in the same way Bucky would have, but all he can see is how little the world has changed.
He’s paraded through lights and cameras and interviews, and although he doesn’t understand the computers and screens and brilliant, brilliant colours, he remembers how to perform, so he smiles and self-deprecates and tries to remember how his old neighbour who lived down the hall had sounded when talking about ‘the good old days’.
66 years after, or 8 months and 4 days
Steve is almost at the end of his dossier when he sees an article from the New York Times dated for June 24th, 2011 and he cries for the first time in 8 months and 4 days.
A rainbow flag flies over two men embracing in a way that makes Steve ache for the feeling of Bucky’s arms around him, ache for even the hidden life they could have lived back in their time. He wraps a blanket around himself until he stops shaking, then taps the magnifying glass on his tablet and begins to type. He searches for “marriage equality”, then “same sex marriage”, then “gay rights”, then “LGBT”.
Steve thinks of how right he felt in Bucky’s arms, how Peggy’s lips felt against his, the betrayal he’d felt when Peggy’s presence still brightened a room in the wake of Bucky’s death. Steve learns that he is bisexual, he thinks, 80 years too late.
9 months, 20 days after, or 67 years
Fury comes to him with another fight, only it’s the exact same fucking one he thought he’d ended. He should have left that goddamned cube at the bottom of the ocean where it belonged.
Power begets power and sometimes even the best people can’t leave well enough alone.
67 years after, or 9 months and 23 days
Steve finds himself on a team of people who remember him as a hero and can’t decide if he’d rather they dismiss him as a dancing propaganda monkey. They look to him to lead and yet refuse to respect the authority they’ve placed upon him, and suddenly the lack of good natured ribbing and snarky French commentary and Dum Dum’s stupid fucking bowler hat and Bucky by his side hits him like a freight train—no, not a train, never a train.
He finds the weapons SHIELD was designing and all he can think about are the people who gave their lives to keep these powers from the future—the person.
Steve works with Stark—Tony—to keep the helicarrier in the air and regrets the harshness of his earlier words. Later, he will regret the callousness with which he treats Tony’s grief over Coulson’s death. In the moment, he only sees the weakness he feels in himself.
He watches Natasha watch Clint in the infirmary and recognises the tension in her shoulders from when Bucky had held vigil by Steve’s own sickbed.
He doesn’t see so much as feel the guilt pouring off Bruce in waves after he’s shuddered back into himself. He thinks maybe he can lead this team after all, if they’d let him.
69 years after, or 2 years, 7 months, and 18 days
Steve’s done his best to move on. He still goes to bed alone and wakes up cold, but he learns to trade invitations with women on good days when he can tell idolisation apart from interest. He thinks he’s doing better than he is until he realises he could be trading the same invitations with men and his mind raises its hackles in defence of Bucky. He likes to think he tries with Sam, but their loose camaraderie only inspires the same dull ache in his chest as going on missions with Natasha.
As much as he plays up his technological incompetence, Steve’s learned all about the internet and social media, but that doesn’t mean he feels as comfortable around screens and keyboards as he does good old fashioned pen and paper. And pen and paper are old fashioned now, but he can’t bring himself to draw with anything else. He’s even all caught up on his history—because the future he could have had is now history—and politics, and queer theory, if not popular culture, and he deals with the incongruity of social revolutions and political stagnation. Or he thinks he does until Fury shows him Project Insight.
2 years, 7 months, and 20 days after, or 69 years
The Winter Soldier has Bucky’s face and Steve can’t stop the words “Who the hell is Bucky?” from echoing through his memories. Bucky is his best friend, his right hand, his ‘til death do us part. Bucky is. Bucky is his.
Fury is also still alive and Steve tries to feel surprised, tries to feel anything, but once Natasha is no longer in danger of bleeding out, Steve loses himself in the emptiness that had been behind Bucky’s eyes. The panic he had felt when Natasha’s grenade has exploded beneath him reshapes itself into guilt as Steve puts together what must have happened to Bucky while he was under the ice.
Sam pulls him out of it because of course he does. The thought of having to put Bucky down, Winter Soldier or not, feels sharp, prickly, guarded by superfine needles that slide in deep and refuse to come out. So he comes up with a plan: save the world, save Bucky, or die trying.
69 years after, or 2 years, 7 months, and 21 days, or 1 day
Bucky pulled him out of the Potomac. Bucky saved his life. Bucky remembered.
Steve was wholly, irrevocably, unquestionably sure, and yet he couldn’t find it in himself to explain to Sam, or Natasha, or Fury, how that gloved metal hand had felt more like home than any place he had lived in the past two and a half years. Even if he had been unconscious the moment he hit the water, he would have known Bucky came after him because Bucky always has.
It may be 69 years in the future, but as long as Steve continues to find trouble for himself, it seems Bucky will find a way to get him out of it. And if there’s anything Steve knows better than the feeling of Bucky at his back, it’s the telling off he gets every single time he find himself in need of saving.
So he waits.
13 days after, or 2 years, 8 months, and 3 days, or 69 years
Natasha gets him Bucky’s file, in the meantime. He knows Sam thinks he’ll go after him, and Steve can’t help but feel grateful for Sam’s loyalty when he offers to come with him. But Steve reads Bucky’s file alone in his new apartment in Brooklyn and resolutely does not chase down any of the leads he finds. Instead, he pieces together the atrocities committed by the Winter Soldier one by one, and systematically mourns, then forgives Bucky for his involvement in each and every one of them.
82 days after, or 2 years, 10 months, and 8 days, or 70 years
The first thing Bucky tells him off for is opening the door unarmed to a known assassin who had previously been hired to kill him. Steve reminds him that Bucky has saved his life far more times than he's tried to take it and that Bucky was the one at the door, not the Winter Soldier.
The second thing Bucky tells him off for is believing that Bucky and the Winter Soldier are two different people, that Bucky is even remotely the man Steve remembers him to be. Steve hands Bucky his file and claims he knows who Bucky is, he knows what the Winter Soldier has done, and he loves him anyway.
The first thing Steve tells Bucky off for is blaming himself for the people killed by his hand.
The second thing Steve tells Bucky off for is believing that Steve could ever stop loving him, no matter how much either of them have changed.
70 years after, or 83 days, or 2 years, 10 months, and 8 days
The first thing Sam tells Steve and Bucky off for is keeping him out of the loop. When Bucky insists that there was no loop, Sam gestures to the circle of Steve’s arms around his waist and Bucky can only lean further back into Steve in response, causing Sam to gag in faux-disgust and mutter something about gross old people love on his way out the door.