July 4th, 2015
The first sign of something odd Steve noticed when he stepped into his apartment, his friends’ raucous laughter echoing in the hall behind him, was a soft draught indicating that he must have left a window open.
His companions spilled into the apartment behind him, and toed off their shoes — Sam stumbling drunkenly over his shoelaces and holding on to the edge of Steve’s bookshelf for support while Natasha snickered at him and delightedly crowed her victory in the drinking game they’d engaged in earlier that evening.
Steve smiled at the scene, a flame of affection settled in his chest and licked warmly at his ribs.
He was, once again, reminded of how lucky he was to have people that made living in this strange future worth it.
Pausing as suddenly as the thought of the person he wanted most to be at his side struck him, Steve gasped a surprised breath. Technicolour faded to sepia in a millisecond. His heart clenched painfully, as did the fingers of his left hand. The space at his left felt strangely empty, like a throbbing ache.
Goddammit, Buck, where are you? He cast the question wide, like a net, hoping to catch some harbinger of the one person who Steve yearned for the most.
Of course, there was no answer. There never was. Only the whispered breeze replied soothingly.
Sighing, shoulders slumped slightly under the weight of grief that he still refuses to swallow, Steve gathered what he could from the darkened walls and corners of his apartment. He swept through the apartment, the faint breeze stroking his cheek as he followed its current to its root at a window in the living room. It was ajar. Swaying slightly with the meandering waves of air spilling into the room.
Confused, Steve swung it shut and locked it. He was sure that he had checked it was shut before he left, and yet…
“Steve!” He startles at Natasha’s yelling, “get some Tylenol, Sam’s going to need it in the morning.”
She emerged, Sam’s right arm slung over her shoulders, supporting the man’s weight and the pair stumbled clumsily to the couch, where they flopped gracelessly into the sea of cushions. Immediately, perhaps not wanting the night to end just yet, Natasha fiddled with the remote for the TV.
The muffled sound of Natasha flicking through TV channels, one second blaring action music and the next the monotonous drone of a news anchor delivering the day’s daily dose of misery, reached Steve where he was digging through his medicine cabinet. Among the miscellaneous noise filtering through the walls, came the faint echo of fireworks.
Steve checked his watch, 20:00 on the dot.
The sight that greeted Steve when he returned to the living room, Tylenol in one hand and blankets in the other, was dyed in hues of bright pink, vivid purple, deep blue, between fleeting flashes of orange. The bouquets of light erupting in the sky beyond the wide windows sent shadows fleeing into hiding, seeking refuge under couches, the coffee table, behind picture frames of his artwork, and in dark corners. The whole image of his friends curled together, swallowed among the cushions, in his home felt surreal with the dancing brightly coloured light illuminating the scene. He set the medicine on the coffee table, and the blankets on the edge of the couch.
Steve realised at once that they were not only in his home, they were his home. Home is where the heart is, after all.
Except a piece of his heart was still missing. Still lingering just out of his reach, in the vast open world.
“You ever used to think the fireworks were for you?” asked Sam from where he was squished between the arm of the couch and Natasha’s slight frame, his words were slurred to the point of almost resembling gibberish.
Steve snorted in amusement.
“Yeah, my ma and Bucky joined forces to convince me they were my birthday present from the world,” Steve tilted his face thoughtfully, eyes glazed over as he submerged himself in the pleasant memory, “we were allowed to stay up past our bedtimes to sit on the fire escape and watch them.”
Steve remembers smiling until his cheeks hurt. Some of the resurfaced memories smelled like his ma’s mock apple pie, others smelt like the pomade Bucky used in his hair.
“Who broke the news to you? That they weren’t for you?” Natasha asked, eyes still keen and sharp despite the slight blurry edge to her voice giving away both her growing fatigue and her expertly hidden inebriation.
“My ma.”
“Not Bucky?”
“No. He wanted my day to be special,” Steve whispered, swallowing the grief, and deflecting Natasha’s curious gaze with a stiff smile, “became a kind of inside joke.”
“It’s not the whole story though, is it?” she asked.
The only sound that accompanied the quiet voices emitting from the TV was silence. It dragged on for what seemed to be either a few seconds or a few hours. It was a game of chicken, waiting for the other to speak. Then Sam snored, shattering the melancholic bubble. Sighing with exhaustion, Natasha rearranged herself into a more comfortable position, folding her legs onto the couch with the grace of a raven folding its wings. Sighing with relief, Steve thanked whatever luck he had left that Natasha had stopped her prying.
“Even fossils need their sleep, we’ll see you in the morning,” Natasha said through a yawn, and spoke once more, “happy birthday, Steve.” She then pulled a blanket over herself and Sam, and promptly fell into what appeared to be sleep.
“Night.” He wandered to his room, stopping momentarily to stare at the previously open window; then continued to walk in perplexed silence.
Steve stopped again, one foot comically still raised in the air, and eyes drawn to the sight of soft orange light spilling from the gap under his bedroom door. He didn’t leave the light on when he left. Immediately, all dregs of drowsiness dissipated and cold adrenaline spread through him like a rip tide. He picked up his shield delicately before creeping towards the light.
The door swung silently on its hinges as he nudged it open with his toe. With practised caution, Steve crept into the room only to find nothing amiss except for his bedside lamp still on. His enhanced ears only picked up the humming of electricity flowing through the bulb.
A pristine copy of L. Frank Baum’s ‘The Wizard of Oz’, one Steve did not own, lay under the canopy of light.
He approached it carefully, feet not making even a whisper of sound as they moved across the hardwood floor. A piece of paper stuck out from the pages, a bookmark Steve surmised. With one hand setting down and propping the shield against the wall and the other flipping to the marked page, Steve wondered if this was a clever attempt of sneaking an additional present into his home perpetrated by Natasha.
His eyes fell onto the page and consumed the familiar words that he had read before one frigid winter day while wrapped in blankets in the equally frigid apartment he had shared with Bucky before the war. A single line on the page had been underlined in pencil — only one.
"Tell me something about yourself and the country you came from," said the Scarecrow, when she had finished her dinner. So she told him all about Kansas, and how gray everything was there, and how the cyclone had carried her to this queer Land of Oz.
The Scarecrow listened carefully, and said, "I cannot understand why you should wish to leave this beautiful country and go back to the dry, gray place you call Kansas."
"That is because you have no brains," answered the girl. "No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home."
The Scarecrow sighed.
"Of course I cannot understand it," he said. "If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably all live in beautiful places, and then Kansas would have no people at all. It is fortunate for Kansas that you have brains.”
A small smile appeared on his face, and the rigid and alert posture of his spine softened while he pondered the underlined words. He flipped over the bookmark, and promptly dropped it in shock when he was met with familiar slanted handwriting.
It drifted to his feet where he hastily retrieved it, his hands shivering with tremors.
Happy birthday, punk. The fireworks are still for you.
- Bucky
Steve sank onto the bed. He curled into himself, and cried. “Goddammit, Buck, come home,” he whispered shakily, tears dipping over the curve of his cheeks and between his parted lips, “there’s no place like home, Buck. So come home. Come home to me.”