Homecoming

Bucky can’t sleep. It’s nothing new. There’s a reason that, even ten years in the future, he still sleeps like they’re in the middle of war. His memory is holey, he knows - remembering is an unpredictable process initiated by random situations, words, associations. But he knows enough. Facts, habits, knowledge that is too far ingrained into the deepest parts of his subconscious to not know. Like the feeling of home, the habits of war, how to cook a mean cholent, the smell of dusty metal in the wind before an ambush.

Steve.

Steve in summers, sweaty and wheezing because the heat was too dry for his lungs, Steve in winters, sweaty and wheezing because the cold was slowly killing him. Steve in his arms, between hours of cooking easily stomachable food and rotating between warm and cold leg compresses. Steve breathing into his ear, slower, slower, slower, until he finally fell into a fitful sleep of which Bucky was praying he would wake up from again. Steve’s clammy forehead against Bucky’s lips, while he was mouthing his unsayables and pushing his hand through sticky hair and counting the seconds in between breaths.

You better not leave me, fucking punk, you better not, I put all this effort into this stupid fucking chicken soup and I’ll follow you to the afterlife for the beating of your lifetime if you ain’t eating it.

(Steve rattles in a breath like he ate glass, and Bucky’s lips relax against his skin in an exhausted kiss.)

Steve in spring, not the muddy spring in february, but the fresh, dry spring in late april, on the tiny square of revived meadow behind their apartment complex, waiting for him to come home. Steve has a lot of health issues, but at least pollen allergies aren’t one of them, so he can safely watch and sketch the batches of wildflowers growing there as long as he wants. Steve in fall, on clear nights just short of october, watching the stars on the fire escape while berating Bucky for smoking like a chimney, as always.

I gotta catch up to yer shit lungs somehow, Stevie.

Steve in –

Steve in front of him. Steve in his bed, in their bed, in the middle of the night, breathing deep and regular, completely healthy. Steve, who doesn’t need saving anymore, Steve, who in turn is the one saving now, Steve, who saved Bucky a handful of times and gave up his shield for him almost as many. Steve, who doesn’t need worrying about anymore.

Steve.

Steve turns in his sleep, almost like he sensed Bucky’s unease, and Bucky stays still, waiting and observing what he does. Steve scoots over, his arm flopping over Bucky’s waist and then snaking around it softly, under his sleeping shirt at the back, to pull him closer. Bucky’s breath hitches almost painfully as Steve’s chin leans against his hairline, but then calms down exponentially as he feels and hears Steve murmur against his hair.

“Sleep, Buck. M’here.”

And who is he to deny Captain America?

For once, Bucky doesn’t wake up sweaty on the ground, not remembering what he dreamt about. For once, he hasn’t dreamt at all, because for once, he felt safe.

Instead, his hindbrain kickstarts into overdrive right out of sleep, and he almost punches his own daughter in the face as she jumps onto the bed with them. The only thing keeping him from it is Steve’s arm around his shoulders holding him down on war reflexes and superhuman strength alone.

It’s saturday. Saturday means no waking up early. Also means the kids waking them up instead of an alarm.

“Morning papa, morning daddy!”

Steve sluggishly pulls back the arm he still had slung around Bucky. They had changed positions sometime during sleep, with Bucky’s back to Steve’s chest and Steve’s arm around Bucky’s shoulder and collarbone, where Bucky had held onto his forearm with his own hands. Maggie slides down from where she’s sitting on the side of Bucky’s hipbone to in between their legs, wiggling on her knees.

Beck crawls into the bed with them a few seconds later, after Steve and him sat up, the blankets pooling in their laps, and Maggie has cuddled up to Steve, giggling smugly. Bucky breathes in deeply, trying to get his heart rate back down, before he picks up his son by his armpits from where he’s still struggling to get his legs up onto the edge of the mattress and hugs him to himself.

“Good morning, sweethearts. Hope you all slept well, because –“

“I sure as hell did!” Steve and Maggie finish his sentence in unison, and while Steve berates her for language, Bucky scoffs in amusement. Beck giggles as well, repeating hell, hell, hell under his breath, and Bucky lets him get away with it, because, oh to hell with it, whatever. These are their kids after all, they’re bound to end up cussing all ‘round the clock either way if they end up anything like them.

“Y’all hungry yet?” Steve asks, and Bucky can hear the sleep still lowering his voice down and pulling out the Brooklyn slur in it remarkably. Sexy motherfu–

The kids whine, and they take it as a no.

“Alright then, family cuddle time until I hear the first stomach rumble.”

They don’t get out of bed until breakfast time turns into brunch time, and by the time they’re all washed up and dressed for the day brunch time has already creeped into lunchtime as well. 

Bucky suggests a big brunch buffet like they did back in the days with their families, with sandwiches, eggs, sausages, Steve’s ma’s shepherd’s pie and his ma’s infamous potato salad and probably a whole other slew of Barnes recipes because for the love of god his ma could never hold back with these.

Steve agrees wholeheartedly, excited about reliving their younger years, but then backtracks, offering to do it tomorrow instead. Bucky lifts up a suspicious eyebrow.

“We’ll have more time to prepare tomorrow,” Steve adds as he saunders over to the stove with a pot of potatoes, rushing through a quick lunch of mashed potatoes, gravy and veggies while he instructs Bucky to prepare a few sandwiches for snacks later.

Bucky doesn’t question his task, putting all ingredients onto the dining table that he can find in the fridge and letting the kids decide what they want on their sandwiches while he keeps talking to his husband.

“More time, as opposed to today, which is saturday?”

Steve hums, then laughs. Bucky picks out the lunchmeats and cheeses and condiments that the children chose and prepares two sandwiches each. He doesn’t get another answer out of Steve since he’s busy ricing the potatoes while simultaneously mixing and blending together the gravy, so he turns to the children instead. He leans over the table to whisper and play conspiracy, “Why do we have less time today than we do tomorrow?”

Maggie holds a hand around her mouth to shield her voice away from Steve. “‘Cuz of uncle Sam!”

“Uncle Sam,” Beck repeats his sister softly, nodding his head.

“Uncle Sam,” Bucky parrots them both back unimpressed, already not liking where this is going. The last big memory he has of Sam Wilson, who he assumes by all means is uncle Sam, is him having a ball about not putting his car seat up just to spite Bucky when really, they had bigger issues to worry about. Lord knows their relationship has changed the last ten years, but Bucky seriously doubts it did.

“Uncle Sam,” Steve chimes in just for the sake of it, snorting while he chops veggies into a smaller pot. Bucky rolls his eyes. To hell with superhuman hearing.

He feels like he could ask more questions, but he also doesn’t want to repeat that whole sequence again. He’d rather just wait and see.

He gets up to put away the sandwich ingredients and find some lunchboxes for the kids. And in theory, Bucky knows he shouldn’t be able to maneuver the kitchen well, he has no idea where they store everything and he should be asking Steve instead of snooping. But he doesn’t. Because in practice, he doesn’t need to. He goes for one of the lower cupboards, being greeted by a shelf full of storage containers, plastic wares and metal lunchboxes, taking two of them out to box away the snacks. Only after the process is done does he halt and frown about the way he knew where the lunchboxes were like they’re part of his subconscious the same way Steve is.

Huh.

“Doll, can you keep an eye on the veggies real quick?”

Huh.

“‘Course,” Bucky murmurs, still hung up on the lunchbox situation while he joins Steve at the stove, not even registering the pet name as he listens to the instructions Steve gives him on steaming veggies. They’re almost done, so he really does only need to keep an eye on them. Bucky snorts as he watches Steve step away through his peripheral. “What, you only givin’ me the easy tasks? Don’t trust me with cooking anymore?”

Steve takes his time answering because he’s busy instructing the children to set the table with him. He hands out plastic plates to Beck, cutlery to Maggie, and keeps the porcelain to himself.

“Who’s done quickest gets banana chips for dessert! – Well, you don’t hear me complaining, but the last time you cooked a full meal was in forty-two something when I was sick and the last time I cooked was yesterday.”

Bucky takes the veggies off the steaming pot, theatrically gasping. “This is slander against the Barnes family name. Ma would be disappointed in you, Stevie.”

“Doesn’t change the fact that you haven’t cooked in, uh, eighty-five years.”

“Lies, children. Don’t listen to your daddy. He’s a liar.”

Steve chuckles, helping Bucky bring all the pots and saucepans over onto the table so they could start on lunch. While they move around the kitchen together, they duck around each other naturally, fluidly, like that’s what they always have done. (Maybe it is.) Steve even gives out quick pecks here and there while snaking past Bucky, one on his ear, one on his shoulder, one on his brow. Bucky feels like his heart isn’t made for this.

Or maybe, his heart has always been made entirely for this.

The kitchen is loud after lunch. While he and Steve decided to do the dishes, the kids decided to stay at the table, watching their favorite series while sharing the banana chips Maggie had earned earlier. 

They’re good kids. They’re stupidly similar to him and Steve as children, all squabbles and quick wits and intense facial expressions, but also quiet care and always on the lookout for each other. Especially Maggie. Any time Bucky catches her poking fun at Beck, dangling a chip over his head where he can’t reach, but then helping him stuff the chip in his mouth under the guise of ‘lemme help, you ain’t no good to do it alone’ he questions if she isn’t just a carbon copy of himself from an alternate reality.

God. She’ll grow up beautifully.

Just as the dishes are about to be done, only the cutlery left in the sink, there’s another sound joining the ambient noise of the kitchen. Bucky can’t place it at first, but as the seconds pass and the sound gets more prevalent, he locates it to outside, and it’s familiar. Not familiar in a long lost memory type of way, rather than a throwback to his own timeline type of way. He squints his eyes as he leans over to the window to look outside, but he sees nothing aside from the tail end of a shadow passing their house overhead. He makes quick work of the cutlery in the sink, passing it over onto the drying rack and drying his hands on the corner of the towel in Steve’s hands.

The kids get excited behind them. The tablet plonks down onto the table, abandoned, and Maggie jumps up to grab her bag. 

“He’s here, he’s here, daddy, we’ll go out on the sea with Uncle Sam again!” She chants, rushing around the lower floor and rummaging around like she just now thought about packing what she needs, and Bucky carefully, amusedly, steps around her on his way into the hallway. He hears Steve agreeing to her antics, chuckling quietly to himself, probably helping Beck out of his high chair, as Bucky makes his way out the front door and around to the back of the house to see where the commotion came from.

His suspicions get confirmed when he comes face to face with a quinjet, landed inconspicuously a few hundred meters away from the house. It’s just now powering down, and he crosses his arms in anticipation of who’s to come out, aside from Uncle Sam. Before he can see, though, his attention gets caught by a small hand pulling on the seam of his shirt, and when he looks down he sees Maggie, excited and wiggling in her place, backpack high on her shoulders and rattling around like she has a whole toolbox in there. Her free hand is flapping around as well, like she does when she can’t contain herself, and Bucky just adores her so much.

She squeals and storms ahead a second later, and when he follows her with his gaze, he sees her jump into the awaiting, open arms of one Sam Wilson, equally excited as Bucky’s daughter as he steps out and down the quinjet’s ramp. He spins her around and jumps with her in his arms, his deep, bellowing laughter echoing between them and where Bucky stands. Bucky is a little concerned with the durability of Maggie’s backpack in the whole action, it moving up and down dangerously on her back.

“Aye! Lil’ Miss America! Miss your old uncle Sam, huh?”

Sam looks like he hasn’t aged a day. At least not from this distance. His hair and beard are slightly longer and more grown in than what Bucky remembers him usually wearing, his hair long enough to almost form a mini version of an afro? That seems like an appropriate way to describe it, but Bucky rather keeps that to himself, who knows if he’s actually being unintentionally inappropriate. His beard looks nice too, quite similar to how Bucky likes to wear it at the moment, a little longer and fuller, but still neatly trimmed.

Steve steps up next to Bucky then, setting Beck down from where he carried him outside on his hip, and the little punk runs forward in the direction of the quinjet, stumbling a little on his way but never falling, and Sam sets Maggie back down to walk their way as well, rushing in and sweeping their son from his feet on his way, giving him the same treatment he gave their daughter. He walks the rest of the way with Beck on his arm, Maggie hopping alongside until Sam is in front of them.

(It doesn’t even occur to him that he’s not this timeline’s Bucky and that it might be a problem that Sam will interact with him.)

“Heya, good afternoon there, mister and mister American Dream,” he greets lightly, setting Beck down and then pointing a finger back and forth between them, “Speaking of, since when is the dream team back together? Haven’t heard anything from you in ages, dude.” Sam takes another step closer, and it’s almost instinct for Bucky to take the hand he’s outstretching to pull Sam in closer and pat him on the back with the other hand in a brotherly hug. For a second he stumbles over his own thoughts trying to come up with something to answer, but Steve takes over smoothly.

“Oh, just a few days, actually. No heads up or anything, jerk just stood there in the middle of the front yard Thursday afternoon. Had to throw out all my carefully made plans for that evening.”

Sam and Steve repeat the brotherly hug, and Bucky plays indignant over top, scoffing loudly.

“Thought we were over the whole silent broody assassin schtick, B,” Sam jokes, giving him a subtle-not-so-subtle once over, and Bucky can’t really tell if he’s doing it because he’s suspicious of his sudden appearance here without any prior knowledge of it or because he’s just Sam and their whole relationship has always just been mutual bickering. Bucky counts on the latter. “As far as I know, appearing out of nowhere and scaring the crap out of people got out of style back in 2016.”

And oh, yeah, Bucky remembers the instance Sam is referencing. In this timeline it’s been twelve years since then, but in his it feels like it happened just a few months ago. In the small time frame T’Challa granted them to rescue their allies from that weird underwater prison, before they got back to Wakanda to let Shuri take care of Bucky’s fried brain and cryo freeze him back up because he didn’t trust himself after everything that had gone down. He cringes at the memory of Tony Stark that invades him momentarily, the guilt rearing its ugly head before he can do anything against it, but quickly pushing it aside for the memory of unintentionally sneaking up on Sam and making him flinch (and even jump, once or twice) when he spoke up behind him on multiple occasions.

He knows it was mostly unintentional, but he does remember feeling immensely amused by it anyway. Being able to move silently and stay undetected as long as he wants to is one of the very, very few advantages of his seventy year long overdue life.

“Did it, now,” Bucky deadpans with the blankest, broodiest stare he can muster, staring Sam straight in the eye until the discomfort is clear on his face. Sam grimaces as he pointedly looks away, grumpily murmuring about ‘ten years and still with this shit’. Bucky can’t keep the smug grin of his face, and even Maggie giggles next to them, as entertained by this as her old man.

“Well, I think this is my cue, before I get stared to death,” Sam deflects loudly, ruffling Maggie’s hair and deliberately turning back to the jet with a swing of his arm. “As always, kids are in bed by nine, at the latest, no superhuman child stays unsupervised, and any and all usage of enhanced abilities will be in safe training environments only. Or when I need help with the boat, only Maggie, of course, have a nice weekend you two!”

Maggie cheers, already hopping ahead with her backpack protesting loudly, and Sam follows quickly, as if he’s trying to avoid any more nagging from their side. Bucky watches his retreat a little confusedly, brows furrowed and nose scrunched, before his brain catches up with what Sam had sputtered out so quickly.

“Did you just say you’ll exploit my daughter for child labor?”

Steve snorts next to him, as Sam ushers Maggie and Beck forward before throwing his hands up and calling out over his shoulder, “It’s not child labor if she volunteers!”

Sam disappears up the ramp with a cackle and another loud goodbye! and Bucky resigns himself to his fate with a strained sigh and a hand to his eyes.

Apparently, this is a regular occurrence. Sam picks up their kids every other week or so, for a weekend trip with their godfather, while he and Steve join their friends for a movie night. The friends in question, Steve explains, are the rest of the Avengers. It’s organized by Tony, and most often than not taking place in the Avengers compound. Usually everyone is present, or at least everyone who can manage without work or families interfering. If anyone can’t make it, they usually let the others know in advance.

It calms Bucky down a lot more than he would have thought. To know that whatever happened with Thanos and in the years before, still fresh in Bucky’s mind and still happening in his timeline, did not break the Avengers up over the years. Maybe even bound them together closer.

It only gives him a little anxiety to think about being in Tony Stark’s immediate vicinity and him not trying to blow his arm off on sight. The guilt and fear knot up his stomach in a way Bucky doesn’t remember ever feeling for anyone else. He can’t imagine how he was ever able to atone for what he did to the man and his family, let alone get so far on his good side that he would be invited to a movie night with him.

But apparently, he did. And to his defense, it’s been over ten years since then. A lot can happen in a few years, too much for him to understand in his position from the past.

So, he’ll take it as what it is. As best as he can.

They get picked up by another quinjet a few hours later, after Steve was on the phone with Natalia to ask if they should bring anything, tell her that Bucky would be joining them again, and subsequently had to pass over the phone to Bucky himself so she could chew him out in spitfire russian for completely going off the radar for months so that not even she could get any intel of his location. He let her tirade wash over him diligently, feeling like a scolded kid, not being able to do anything more than say sorry for something that was out of his control. After she was done, they only talked for a few more minutes, so that she could really drive home the point, in her usual deadpan, twisted way, that she missed him and that he shall not dare do anything like that again if he wants to come home to his family ever again.

Bucky missed her dearly, too.

“You didn’t tell me,” he starts when they board the quinjet and put down their bags with snacks close to the cockpit seats, “We retired but I was gone on a mission for six months – Still am, technically. How?”

Steve’s shoulders hitch up a little at that, but he seems to distract himself with the quinjet’s blinking and overly technical control panels for a second, booting it up and trying to gain access. He huffs a little, and Bucky hears the soothing, but kind of smug voice of the AI offer ‘access denied’. How can an AI sound smug?

“Your pardon was under a few conditions. One of them was missions for the government whenever they deemed it necessary. Goddamnit – Friday, admin access via voice activation.”

The AI beeps in confirmation, following up with ‘voice activation for access enabled. Input required.’

Steve straightens back up, glancing over to Bucky with equal parts pain and anger in his eyes. Bucky knows that look. It’s the look Steve has been donning since he was nothing more than ninety pounds soaking wet, getting into fights about things that were just not right in his eyes and coming out with a bloody nose and bruised ribs. This is a fight he’s been part of for a long time, Bucky guesses.

“I’ve played my ‘Steve Rogers, Captain America’ card often enough to get them off your back, but the council had finally agreed to let you off the hook after this final mission. It was a big one, and they needed your expertise for it, so it was either this or nothing. I didn’t expect for it to be so – for you to be –“

Steve trails off, his face pulling together in a pained grimace. Bucky hears the implications crystal clear anyway. Compromised. Risky. Gone.

He doesn’t blame Steve for dropping the topic.

The AI, Friday, repeats itself. Steve looks back down to the controls, before waving Bucky over with a sigh and a forced grin. “Try the voice activation, Buck. I wanna know what Tony put in for you this time.”

Bucky steps up next to Steve, staring at the displays stupidly. He knows some of this still from Shuri’s lab in Wakanda, but he never really got a hold of all this new technology stuff. Especially not technology from the future, even farther advanced than 2018.

“Uh. Okay. Bucky Barnes.”

There’s two beeps, sounding like a negative. Friday repeats ‘voice activation required’.

“Uhm. James Buchanan Barnes.”

Two more beeps. Steve seems to loosen up next to him, chuckling quietly to himself. Bucky frowns.

“What the, what am I supposed to say? How should I know what –“ Bucky huffs at Steve’s amused wave to keep going, turning back to the control display with petty determination.

“The Winter Soldier.”

Negative. Thank fucking God.

“Sergeant James Barnes?”

Steve has way too much fun with Bucky’s despair in that moment. Bucky tries getting Steve to do it instead, but once again, he only gets waved off. He pinches the skin on the bridge of his nose in displeasure. How the hell should he, the Bucky from ten years ago, know what Tony Stark puts in for his voice activation in his AI nowadays? He knows Tony has a knick for stupid nicknames and references that probably hasn’t changed over the years, but there’s so much time that has passed, it could be anything.

He sighs, really not wanting to get down on that level, but having no other way around it as long as Steve lets him suffer like this. They need to get going.

“Manchurian Candidate?”

Bucky throws up his hands in retaliation when even that gets him a negative from Friday.

“What the fuck, Stark – Robocop! Terminator! I, Robot! Iron Giant!”

There’s a different set of beeps somewhere in between that, and Bucky halts, surprised, having been ready to rattle off all kinds of cyborg and robot related references he’d been able to catch in the time he’s been with Shuri. (She is scarily similar to Stark when it comes to situational humor like this, though exponentially less annoying about it. He remembers the movie nights she made him sit through fondly.)

“Welcome on board, wakandan sugar baby,” Friday’s voice greets softly, sounding pleased.

Bucky can only hold back a scream with his superhuman strength.