Chapter Text
They received the news before anyone else.
The president and his top staff, the army generals, and the SSR brass all knew. But the press would not be informed, not yet, when the news would spread like wildfire through Europe and shake troop morale. They were sure Germany’s surrender was just weeks away, it had to be held off, for now.
It was an older fellow who told them, a gruff exterior that couldn’t quite hide the sadness in his eyes. He was a commanding officer, they knew, but the name had slipped from their minds like water as soon as he opened his mouth.
When Winifred had opened the door, she knew immediately. The sharp gasp of horror alerted George, who had been in the living room, and Rebecca, who had been upstairs in her room. When the Barnes' had looked at the face of the man, in his dress greens, a dimness in his eyes, they knew: one of their boys was dead.
Time slowed and converged, the words floating around their heads, drifting in and around her ears, warbling and ebbing, unable to stick in her brain. She fragments of sentences “regret to…,” “fell,” “couldn’t recover,” “crashed,” “no body,” “saved us,” “Arlington.”
Both her boys. Gone. Just days apart. So soon after one another that the telegram for Bucky, her darling son, had not even been sent before Steve had died as well.
Winifred’s legs had given out from under her, Rebecca barely able to catch her in time, her own shocked grief wrapped around her as George could only stare at the man, the man who he knew was not responsible but who would always be to him, the face that brought the specter of death to their household.
When the US had first joined the war, Winifred was for once, and for the only time, grateful for Steve’s poor health. He would remain here, safe. In that apartment just a few blocks away that he had shared with Bucky, the two always coming around for dinner after church on Sunday.
Bucky had been so sure, in that cocky and aggrandizing way he tended to be as he boarded that boat to Italy. He was putting on a mask, Rebecca knew. The truth was, he was terrified. She could see it in the tightness of his eyes, the straightness of his spine that was normally slouched. She knew her brother, but she didn’t know that would be the last time she would see him.
George had remembered the warring relief and fear when he had first seen Steve after Project: Rebirth. Relief that the boy Bucky had dragged home that day, over fifteen years ago now, would no longer suffer from the ailments that plagued him from birth. And the fear, that crippling fear, that he would be sent to the front lines, the most dangerous missions. But the relief, again, that Steve and Bucky would be able to protect one another; and the gracious sigh that Steve would only be going on the USO tours. He should’ve known that Steve would never be on the sidelines for long.
Steve had saved Bucky, Winifred had known from the heavily redacted letters they had sent, and that had been the impetus for the two being the leaders of their own commando unit, boys that Winifred felt a protectiveness and gratefulness towards, that she knew from Steve’s drawings and Bucky’s words. She had hoped that it was a good omen, Bucky had always protected Steve, now Steve was protecting Bucky; they would be able to save each other from the line of fire, they were each other's guardian angels.
Rebecca knew the odds had not been good. Two men going over, it wasn’t likely that both would return. They would not come back in one piece, if they came back at all. She hoped, she prayed, she prayed every day and wrote their names in the book every Sunday, that they would come home, that her brothers would come home.
His family had always been religious, as Catholic as the Pope, George’s mother would say to him about the Barnes’. Which is why he hoped it was a sign from God that Bucky would be protected by being in the 107th army regiment, the same that Steve’s father—a man that he had never met but that Sarah would always speak of with a twinkle of both grief and love in her eye—had been in. Perhaps it was, instead, a warning. Joseph did not make it away from there alive, neither would his son, or the boy that would’ve been a surrogate child had he survived.
The world had tipped off its axis when the man had given the news. But if the world had tipped every time a family was told their child would not be returning home, the world would surely already be upside down a million times over. So the world resumed its spin, and time continued to flow.
The colonel gave them two American flags and two gold stars to hang in their window, to replace those blue ones they had been so proud of. He also handed them slips of paper, letters he had said, written to them that they had never been able to send. He shook each of their hands and turned back from the porch stoop, exiting their lives as quickly as he entered, but Rebecca did not miss the tear slipping from the corner of his eye.
The Barnes’ sat around the table in silence, George with one arm around his wife and the other around his youngest daughter. Winifred didn’t know how she would tell her other daughters that Bucky and Steve were dead. Couldn’t bear to imagine the crumbling look on their faces as she told them news that would forever mar their lives.
Rebecca fingered the letters, three in total. One had unfamiliar handwriting, but she knew it was from the Commandos, offering their condolences and a way to contact them. She glanced at her mother, who was staring at a framed drawing Steve had sent them, the two boys laughing together. That is how she wanted to remember them. Happy. Not the terror Bucky must’ve felt as he fell from that godforsaken train, nor the fear Steve had as he crashed that damned plane and saved all of their lives. It was poetic, almost, they had always followed each other, and this time, they followed into death.
Her father, his own grief he tried to hide as he comforted his girls, would break down in private, she knew. Rebecca was too numb to feel anything as it appeared her mother felt it all. The anguish, but the small pride, at least, that her boys had heroes, and they hadn’t been alone.
They put the gold stars up the next day, allowing the pain to sit within the household, the other Barnes’ women, with their own families now, rushing back home at the wavering words Winifred had spoken on the phone, telling them to come as soon as they could. Winifred whispered softly as she hung up the star for Steve, “I’m sorry Sarah, I couldn’t protect him.”
The Barnes’ worked through the motions as the neighbors, who had all known them both since childhood, but not yet that Steve was that Steve Rogers, brought over food and tearful condolences, peppered with stories of the two and the gentle havoc they caused when young.
The funeral was cloaked with the somberness that was deserved, with the entire neighborhood and then some going to pay their respects, for the Brooklyn boys had been well-loved and well-known. There were no bodies to bury, so they bought a headstone for Steve and placed it in between his parents at their church, closer to his father now than he had been while Steve was alive, there was some comfort in that, that Steve would be united with the Rogers’ at long last. Bucky’s headstone was nearby, at the plot the Barnes’ had used since they arrived in America three generations prior.
On VE day, the Barnes’ were not the only family who would not celebrate, just weeks after the funeral, the dirt in their little churchyard was still fresh.
It wasn’t until after Japan surrendered that the memorials at Arlington would go up. President Truman himself shook their hands and spoke at the funeral for Captain America and James Barnes. Not Steve and Bucky.
George looked at the white marble, towering over him and pressed a hand to it. Cold. But not as cold as they must have been.
The colonel, Phillips, was there, as were the Howling Commandos—each man a portrait of sincerity heads bowed, Howard Stark—which startled George, despite knowing that Steve and Bucky had met the man, it was shocking to see the man who Bucky talked of in his admiration of his scientific mind and Agent Carter—who Steve had written about frequently, not managing to hide his burgeoning feelings for her. Rebecca wondered if in another life she would’ve been her sister-in-law.
It both broke and mended Winifred’s heart to meet these people who knew sides of Steve and Bucky she never saw, but who shared stories of her boys that were so quintessentially them the first true smile graced her face in the months since their death. They would reunite again, she knew, maybe not for years, but it was not the last she would see of the men that her boys had spoken of so highly, who had cared and protected them.
Their house was cold when they went home again, the gold stars hanging in the window. It would never be as warm without Bucky and Steve, but it wouldn’t always be cold.
Warmth and light would once again emanate from the house, thinking of them would no longer only leave their hearts frigid but would also bring smiles to their faces.
It was when the Barnes’ had been walking back from their church, in the early days of 1946, golden light streaming through the dissipating clouds that they saw the sight that the boys would’ve been so proud to see, that brought a sense of peace that the monuments and speeches never could. It was a boy, a trash can lid painted as Steve’s shield had been in his hand, a gaggle of boys in tow, playing just as Steve and Bucky had, in the same streets they grew up in, with the same carefree smiles and peals of laughter that would never leave their neighborhood, their home.