Homecoming

It’s just as Steve told him. He’s back in Wakanda without much forewarning, the tail end of his quip still on the tip of his tongue, and a sick feeling of disparity settling in his stomach. There isn’t much time for grieving while they reorient themselves and regroup, though Bucky has the sobering intuition that he’s the only one with any memories of their time away. The air feels different around him.

The only thing that’s getting him through the fight, through the tiring mindset of allowing his training and the remnants of muscle memory to take over for him yet again, is the vision of their future. The certainty that it’s all worth it in the end, that this is the last battle of life and death, that everyone’s getting out of this mostly unscathed and they’ll be able to have a life of retirement, with children and friends, afterwards. Soon it’s all over, Steve will go back in time, sort out the stones and bring back the files about their kids, they’ll find them, live their lives, and have movie nights with the avengers every weekend while Sam is taking the kids.

It doesn’t even occur to him that it might play out different than that until the very end, until Tony dies.

And then, after the dust settles and everyone comes together for the funeral, that Natalia is gone as well. Nobody speaks it into existence, but they don’t need to. Bucky realizes it by the way Clint holds himself, by the empty look in Steve’s eyes he’s painfully come to associate with the loss of his Ma, Peggy, himself.

It’s a cruel joke the universe has played on him. It gave him the hope of a happy ending that has been long overdue, a glimpse into the best outcome, a spark of something worthwhile to hold onto, to fight for. Only to take it away from him in the blink of an eye. Made him dependent on it, selfish for it, just like with everything else in his life, only to put it right out of his reach, outside of his power to change a single thing about it.

It makes sense, somehow. He was never meant for happy endings.

He thinks back to Maggie and Beck and their five days together almost every second he’s awake. He regrets that he didn’t spend more time with them, didn’t appreciate them more when he had the time. He should’ve done more for them, and for Steve. If he had known they would be taken from him sooner than he realized, he would’ve savored their time together a lot more, committing every detail to memory, locking away every smile and laugh and babbled russian deep into his heart. Now all he has left are tear stained, bittersweet moments that go dark and grimy with the reality of his own fraying end of the line.

Still, they’re the only thoughts he can desperately, miserably dig the last spout of his slowly loosening grip into when Steve tells him about his plan to not come back from his last mission, to give Sam the shield and live his life like he was supposed to from the beginning.

Of course, he isn’t enough for Steve. Steve has always been bigger than him, than their future in a misplaced time. Bucky had hoped, had attached whatever part of his soul that was still left from before the war to that one branch of the universe where he was allowed to be selfish, but naturally; against the one future he never dared to wish for until he had woken up in it, stand a hundred, maybe even a thousand other futures where Steve decides against him.

It’s the endless cycle their two souls are fated to endure until the end of the time, he guesses. Longing for the other one just out of reach, always the wrong place, always the wrong time. They have always taken turns with it, since their childhood, and after years of Steve holding the torch in their little, tormented game of running after each other, it is now once again Bucky’s turn.

Steve has done enough for him. Without Steve he would still be nothing more than a weapon in the shell of a human. The least Bucky can do is let him have his happy ending without a broken white boy in it, and instead settle for the small handful of peace he was allowed to partake in while he was gone for five years.

He keeps thinking of Maggie and Beck and the other Steve in 2028, and realizes even then, even in a perfect, selfish future, Bucky will end up gone, leaving his family behind to pick up the pieces after him. Even with happiness and heaven and everything good in the world laid out in front of his feet, Bucky ends up trampling all over it in the end anyway.

Steve looks happy with his decision, like he’s at peace with it.

Yeah. Maybe it’s good it’s turning out this way. He was never meant for happy endings. Especially not Steve’s.

He thinks it should be harder to see the love of his life leave him for the last time. It should hurt, he should hurt, he should be crying and screaming and fighting, he should be just as selfish as Steve is being, tell him how unfair he’s being, how he’s leaving him in a time he doesn’t belong in to go back to their shared, rightful place in the world.

But it isn’t. It isn’t hard at all, and that’s maybe the most painful thing about it.

He almost caves when Steve takes him into his arms for their last farewell. He almost caves, almost whispers, “Please come back to me, I love you,” but catches himself with a sad, miserable rendition of a smile that probably fools no one as they step back from each other, opting instead for a very stilted, wrong sounding, “I’ll miss you, buddy.”

They see each other off the same way they always did. Steve says one part of their saying, and Bucky finishes it, bittersweet on his lips. As Banner counts down for the jump, and Steve’s face gets obscured by the helmet, Bucky thinks back to the fond smile the Steve of his future had on his face when he remembered this moment in their bedroom, the picture of their children between them, and realizes it has not an ounce of semblance to this version of the moment.

There was only one more instance where Bucky allowed himself to be selfish. Those five seconds while they waited for Steve’s return, even when Bucky had already accepted every part of Steve’s decision, the reality of it settling in made him plead with whatever Gods there were, anyone who would hear him out, maybe whoever put him into that other beautiful, hopeless timeline in the first place, for a miracle. Please, oh God, please. Make him come back. Make him change his mind and bring him back to me. I don’t know what to do without him. Please.

He got what he deserved for that moment of weakness.

Nothing at all.

He despises himself more and more as time goes on, when he slowly forgets the sound of Maggie’s laugh, the smell of Beck’s hair, the feeling of Steve’s lips against his own, even as he clings to the memories like a dying man to his last breath.

They end up only coming to him in his sleep, as nightmares. As he watches from the asset’s eyes how it murders his family with its bare hands, and he can do nothing but watch.

He wishes he wouldn’t remember at all. But, with everything in his life, the biggest punishment the universe stowed upon him was the ability to never really forget, even if he isn’t allowed to remember anymore.

He’s eventually reminded of why he’s still holding onto this world at all by Sam. It’s not a good reminder by any means, he’s a bitter man with a broken heart by then, but Sam rejecting Steve’s legacy just like that unearths an ugly side of him that he can’t live with. He does everything he can to undo it, get Sam back on the right track, and for that he sacrifices whatever’s left of himself. Because he can’t let Steve be wrong about Sam. Because, if he was wrong about Sam, then he was wrong about Bucky as well. And he can’t let Steve be wrong about leaving Bucky behind.

He can’t let him be wrong about that, because that would mean Bucky was wrong as well.

He was never meant for happy endings, it’s the only thing he was ever right about, and the possibility that he might have been wrong after all is more painful than anything else.

The sacrifices he and Sam go through, the sacrifices Karli Morgenthau makes for her goals, the way Captain America has to bury the body of an innocent child that died for its belief in a good future, makes Bucky realize something.

Maybe, maybe, there was never such a thing as being right or being wrong from the start.

Maybe there’s only the belief in a good future.

Yeah. Maybe he was never meant for happy endings.

Maybe he was always just meant for a good future.