Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“I brought you something.”

That’s how it starts, a statement delivered in a carefully neutral tone. They’ve been sitting at the kitchen table in Bucky’s guest suite in the palace compound. Steve lapsed into silence for a few moments, and Bucky hated the way he’d dropped into the chair like a stone. Steve’s being cagey about what this latest mission was. Which Bucky has come to interpret that it went badly. Steve is always forthcoming with details when the fight goes their way.

“Yeah? More music Sam says we missed?” One of these days, Bucky and Steve are going to have to sit down and compare notes on what sort of 21st century touchstones Steve’s friends are passing on to him versus the ones Shuri insists that Bucky check out.

“No, nothing like that. It’s kind of yours, anyway.” Steve stands, at least moving less stiffly than when he first showed up, and begins digging through his bag. “It’s a photo album,” he offers, but Bucky can see that, the jarring sight of the worn red leather with its yellow-edged pages coming out of Steve’s black tactical bag.

“Mine?” he repeats, throat suddenly dry.

“Yeah. Your family’s. Louise gave it to me, at Jeannie’s funeral. She had a hundred of them already, she said, between your grandparents and your parents and when Becca died. And that this one had a bunch of pictures of me in it.”

Jean was eighteen the last time Bucky saw her, and now she’s dead and buried. He can barely wrap his head around it. Maybe that’s a coping mechanism of some kind. “When was this, again?”

“Three - no, four months before D.C. Anyway, it - really ought to be yours, so - ”

Wordlessly, Bucky holds out his hand for the photo album and Steve hands it over. It’s surprisingly heavy, and Bucky sets it down on the table. “Jesus, Steve, where was this? You’re a fugitive, remember?” Steve is grinning when he looks up at him.

“I can still pull in a few favors. Also. Natasha.”

Before he has a chance to consider whether he really wants to do this, Bucky flips open the cover and is immediately confronted with a yellowed photo, curled at the edges, of himself at barely a year old. “Well, shit,” he mutters.

Steve returns to his chair and drags it around the table so that he is sitting across from Bucky. He does not say anything, but he is practically vibrating with uncertainty.

Baby pictures of the girls are next; Becca, then Jeannie, then Lou, each picture dated in the blank space below in his mother’s delicate cursive. In the first one of him and Steve they are no older than nine, grinning like fools, arms slung around each other’s slender shoulders. Becca, on her first day of school, mousy brown hair done up in tight pincurls. The infant Lou in her cradle, Becca and Jeannie looking on lovingly, while Bucky’s expression screams plainly, ‘another one?’ Christmases and birthdays, joint summer picnics between their two families, the five kids building a snowman with slushy, dirty New York snow. Even now, despite how blurry the photo is, how yellow and faded the lines are, the thought comes to him unbidden: it’s too cold for Steve.

“Jesus Christ,” he chokes out.

“Tell me about it,” Steve says roughly, as he places a hand on the back of Bucky’s neck and squeezes gently.

The five of them grow as Bucky turns the brittle pages. His father disappears from the pictures; his sisters grow into the ages at which he saw them last. The photos grow more candid. Bucky’s presence grows scarcer, and the photo of himself and Steve outside the apartment building where they rented their first place explains why. A faded square outline indicates a photo removed from its spot and never returned.

“The one of you in your uniform, before you left for the front,” Steve explains quietly. “Jean donated it to the Smithsonian and never asked for it back.”

He never felt like much of a soldier; Bucky knows that now. For the longest time he thought it was his memory that was wrong, in the face of the popular myth of the sergeant. He thinks he understands why Jeannie never wanted the photo back.

And it hits him; he’s reached his last appearance in the photo album. Next come the cozy images of the home front. There’s Becca in her Red Cross uniform; Jean volunteering with the USO; Louise and her school friends at a scrap metal drive, blurred with motion.

The photo on the next page makes his breath catch in his throat. The four of them - his sisters and their mother - are standing next to a headstone. Their expressions are heavy; gone are the carefree smiles he’s been browsing past in the last few moments. There’s half melted snow on the ground, and a miniature American flag flutters frozen in time. The date is scrawled beneath the picture. He cannot make out the name on the gravestone, but he knows anyway that the dirt beneath it lies empty. “My birthday,” he whispers.

The next few are much the same. The four of them, at his grave, throughout the year. Ribbons on the fourth of July. Jack-o-lantern on Halloween. The setting doesn’t change, but the seasons do, and so do the people in it. His mother’s hair gets lighter, and then she vanishes entirely. There’s one of Becca, grinning widely, a baby in her arms. James, four months old, meeting his uncle.

“She…named a kid after me?”

“Mmhmm. He goes by Jim. I’ve met him a couple of times. Nice guy. Kinda looks like you.”

Jim isn’t the only child that appears in the photos that follow. There are nieces and nephews, and he sees them grow up in the photos. The photos by his empty grave, meant to include his presence in their lives after the war, fill him with a sick sense of irony that even as they missed him there was a nightmare version of himself running around, just as frozen in time then as his sisters are now in the photographs.

“I should’ve been there,” he murmurs. He remembers when their father died, and he remembers promising Becca he’d look after the four of them, and he remembers Becca rolling her eyes at such a solemn proclamation. We can take of ourselves, she’d said, and she was right, because she had no choice to be right, and now she’s dead. “I was supposed to be there. Were they okay on their own? I wanted to be there. Were they okay?” He breaks off in a sob, and Steve just squeezes the back of his neck again.

“Sure they were okay. You saw them in the same pictures I did. Yeah, they missed you. But they were okay. Because you went and you fought to protect them. They got to live their lives because of you. But you didn’t get your life. I know. That’s the bullshit part.”

Something indescribable in the faces in those photos has torn something loose in Bucky and he sobs in earnest. Steve guides him in to rest his forehead on Steve’s shoulder. Steve wraps his other arm around Bucky’s back and holds on tight. “Such bullshit. I know. I’ve got you. It’s okay. I’ve got you. I miss ‘em too.”

He’s not even sure why he’s crying. Is it for the family he never got to say goodbye to? Is it for the version of himself that never got to come home and live in those later photos? Or maybe for the version of himself that didn’t even know he had a family. Whatever it is, he just grips the back of Steve’s shirt and waits for it to be over. It frightens him, the intensity and the upswell of this emotion. But Steve doesn’t let go, not until Bucky manages to take in a long, shaky breath, and even then Steve keeps one hand on Bucky’s shoulder and the other resting on his forearm.

“I don’t know if you remember this, but after my mom died, you took me home, and we sat at the kitchen table all night, just like this, kind of talking but mostly just sitting.”

And Bucky does remember that. He remembers how small Steve looked, even smaller than normal, with his shoulders bowed forward and his hands draped lifelessly in his lap, almost as if the sorrow was a physical force weighing him down. He remembers his hand on Steve’s knee, as if Bucky could bear some of that burden for him through touch and sheer force of will alone. He remembers they just held on to each other that night, even though their clothes still stunk of antiseptic and death. And with that memory, it all slides into place. It’s grief. It’s just grief, this hollow ache, this bone-deep tiredness. He’s finally mourning the life he should have lived. A life that should have been populated with people he loved, people that are long dead and gone, people that he’ll never see again, people that now only exist in his memories and frozen in photographs. Bucky lifts his head just enough to give the photo album on the table another look, like if he just stares at it long enough and hard enough, the people captured therein will feel how much he loved them, wherever they are now.

Steve follows his gaze, and squeezes Bucky’s shoulder again. He’s wondering, Bucky can tell, if dredging all this up was a bad idea, and Bucky almost forces out an “I’m fine,” but even those two words feel like too much effort as he is now, scraped out and hollow.

“I don’t know if it will help, but…that’s about how it went for me the first time I went back to Brooklyn after I woke up,” Steve says to the silence. “The house where I grew up has a plaque out front. But that building where we rented our first apartment, a couple years after your dad died, they converted the whole thing into a coworking space, whatever that is. And they put a Starbucks on the ground floor. I ordered a chai latte, went back to the hotel, and cried for two hours. Nobody - nobody really got it, not even the Shield shrinks they made me talk to. Just because it had been seventy years - it wasn’t seventy years for me.”

He frowns sideways at Steve, picking up on the layers of anguish beneath that veneer of self-deprecation. Bucky has Steve, at least. Steve went through this alone.

“Finding Peggy and your family helped,” Steve offers in answer to Bucky’s unasked question. “Even though it scared the shit out of me at first. You know what Jeannie said to me when I finally worked up the nerve to call her? ‘What took you so long, Steve? I’m not getting any younger.’”

Bucky tries to imagine those words coming from Jean, but he can’t fathom his sister - any of them - with an old lady’s voice, despite the pictures he’s seen of them with their white hair and liver spots. “You were their favorite,” Bucky says hoarsely. “All the benefits of a big brother, but - they didn’t have to actually live with you, see.”

“I loved ‘em,” Steve says, very quietly. Bucky nods once, letting his eyes drift closed against the next onslaught of tears and still, Steve doesn’t let go.

It’s Steve who breaks the silence, ever so gently. “There’s something else I want you to know. You don’t have to answer right now, or even before I leave. I just want you to start thinking about it.” He hears Steve inhale. “Louise wants to see you.”

His eyes snap open, panicked. “You told her about me?”

“No, Buck, of course I didn’t. But it was on TV, after the U.N. bombing, when you were framed, remember?”

He does remember, the sensation of his stomach bottoming out at the facsimile of his own face glowering up at him from the front page of the newspaper.

“They had a field day with the coverage in the U.S., apparently,” Steve says. “A bunch of talking heads, doing special reports on Hydra, you, me, the Winter Soldier.”

All he can picture is a little girl with her hair in two matching braids in a blue sweater, watching the TV, hand clasped over her mouth in horror. He squeezes his eyes shut.

“So Grace - that’s Lou’s daughter, the one that lives with her - she calls me the night before I left for Bucharest,” Steve continues. “The family lawyer was telling them they had a good case to sue for libel. She said they were all upset, Lou especially. And did I know what the hell was going on. So I told Grace - not everything, but enough. Yes, it was really you, you were alive like I was, because of Hydra. Yes, they’d made you do things you never would’ve done if you had a choice. No, you hadn’t bombed anything, someone was trying to flush you out of hiding, and I was going to find you and help if I could. And after you went back to sleep - I called them and told them you were somewhere safe where you could get better. So now every so often Grace texts me to let me know that Lou was asking about you again, about how you’re feeling and when could she see you.”

“But she - she knows what I did?”

Steve does not start with the ‘that wasn’t really you’, and Bucky is not sure if someone finally sat him down and told him to stop saying it because it wasn’t helping, or if he figured it out on his own. “I don’t know what she knows, Bucky. All I know is what I told her. And I know she wants to see you. But like I said. It’s up to you.”

He knew, of course, beforehand that Louise was still alive, and safe, and with a family of her own, and up until now that had been enough. But now, he isn’t so sure. “D’you think I should?”

“Yes,” Steve answers immediately. “I mean, it’s going to hurt, seeing her that much older. It’s gonna be hard, for you and for her. But it’s worth it. You’ve got time. You should use it.”

It takes Bucky only half a moment to realize where Steve’s certainty is coming from. “I’m sorry about Peg. I wish I could’ve seen her again.”

The smile that Steve gives him breaks his heart a little. “Who said anything about Peggy? Besides, I’m sure you get sick of me talking about the good old days. I think it’d be good for you, to be able to listen to somebody else’s stories for once.”

Bucky doesn’t think he will ever tire of listening to what Steve remembers, especially when their memories line up, and he doesn’t think he will ever not need that confirmation of who he was. But maybe it has nothing to do with their shared past. Maybe he just wants the absolution of knowing his baby sister doesn’t think he’s a monster.

“How would we get there without getting caught? She can’t come here, can she?”

Steve shakes his head. “Don’t worry about all of that. That’d be my job to figure out.”

And it occurs to Bucky that despite Steve’s insistence that it’s his choice, Steve has pretty much already made up his mind that this meeting should and will happen. There’s a long silence, and he must have some strange look on his face because eventually Steve gives his shoulder a little shake. “What’re you thinking, Buck?”

He smiles. “I’m thinking you’ve already decided you’re bringing her here and my buy-in is just a formality.”

Steve opens his mouth to protest, then shuts it again. “Fine. Yes. I really want you to see your last living immediate family member. Sue me.”

“I want to see her too.” He says this quick and quiet, as if it’s a shameful thing to say, and maybe it is. ‘Want’ is a concept he still struggles with sometimes, especially when it comes to wanting something that affects another person.

“You’re allowed to,” Steve answers quietly, perceptive as ever.

“It feels selfish.”

“It feels like you want it for your own sense of closure. It feels wrong to just intrude on someone’s life like you never left.” When Bucky looks over at him, sucking in a breath as if Steve took the very thoughts out of his head, Steve just shrugs. “I told you, Bucky. I’ve done this already.”

“But you had nothing to be ashamed of.” Steve was always the good one. Stubborn as hell and born without any sense of self-preservation, but still the better soul of the two of them.

“The hell I didn’t. I already said I waited too long before I tried to get in touch with them. It felt wrong to go back to your family and talk about you. They’d already moved on, you know? But I hadn’t. The letter I wrote your Ma, Peggy helped me with it, I’d only sent it two years ago.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Bucky says automatically.

Steve gives him a smile that’s halfway between smug and watery. This is what they do now, tell each other things they know to be true, then separate and continue their long campaigns of self-blame. “I didn’t say anything about the train,” Steve says, “but thank you for proving my point. It kind of doesn’t matter whether or not I think it’s my fault. You don’t. Jean didn’t. Louise doesn’t.”

And maybe Steve is right. Maybe it doesn’t matter what Louise does or does not know about the Winter Soldier. Maybe all that matters now is that she wants to see him. That he wants to see her.

“Let’s do it, Steve,” he says, a little louder and a little firmer this time, and Steve claps a hand on his shoulder and gives him a little shake.

Chapter Text

It's easy enough to call to mind an image of the little girl he saw last, the little girl that jumped up into his arms, heedless of their mother's admonishments not to wrinkle his uniform. Goodbyes are easy to remember, actually; have always been the easiest thing for him to find amidst the shattered pieces of his memory. There was, at that last meeting, a forced cheerfulness overlaying a sense of finality, the way it's always been for everyone that has ever marched off to war. He had made his peace with the fact that if he ever made it back to his family he would not be the same, the way his father had come home differently to his mother.

But this? Almost eighty years later with most of them dead and gone? As he slowly relearned the life of Bucky Barnes, relearned that he’d once had a family that he loved fiercely, he could at least be glad that they had not lived to see him as a shell of the child that had gone off to war. But then Steve told him Louise was still alive and there was a brood of nieces and nephews to contend with - all people that deserved so much better than what he could offer them. So he had been content for her to continue to think him dead. Now that she knows he is alive, and as his reunion with her grows closer, Bucky thinks maybe that was just cowardice. If she doesn’t meet him again, she can’t hate him as much as he hates himself sometimes.

It was all settled. Natasha and Sam would allow themselves to be spotted in Ukraine, not far from a known Hydra base; meanwhile Steve would join up with Louise and her daughter in New York before the three of then set out together for Wakanda.

Steve explains this all over Skype one day, offering Bucky an out in nearly the same breath. “If you’re not ready, you just say it. She’ll understand.”

It seems to Bucky that he should be the one offering Louise an out, and he says as much. Even over the slightly fuzzy Internet connection on Steve’s end, Bucky can see the way Steve’s brow furrows. “Are you kidding me? She’s so excited. Grace told me the other day that Lou’s been packing since I told them you were game.” Bucky must not look convinced, because Steve tries to joke about it. “Hey, she was happy enough to see my ugly mug.”

“Steve, you didn’t murder anyone,” Bucky replies easily.

“Buck - ”

“Yeah, yeah,” Bucky scrubs a hand over his face. “It wasn't really me.”

Steve sighs. “That’s not what I was going to say. Just - when I look at you I don’t see the Winter Soldier. I just see you. You know that, right? Give her a chance just to see you again.”

He falls silent, unsure how to respond. Bucky is quiet for so long that Steve's gaze drops down to something out of frame, and he mutters under his breath about unreliable technology.

“'M still here. Look, I just - I don't want her to be disappointed when she comes all this way and I'm not the same.”

“For God’s sake, Bucky, it's been eighty years. She's changed, too.”

It's not that he doesn't understand what Steve is trying to get at. Families reunite after years all the time. Just normally under less extreme circumstances, and minus the decades of torture and brainwashing.

After they hang up, Bucky wonders, not for the first time, how much coaching Steve gets from Shuri and the rest of the doctors here, patient confidentiality notwithstanding. And he wonders how much of that coaching he'll be passing on to Lou and her daughter, to pass the time on the flight, long even with a borrowed Wakandan jet. “I love those things, they practically fly themselves,” Steve said once. “Not a big fan of being the one behind the controls any more.”

Bucky used to be able to do that, bury fear and insecurity beneath a joke and sheepish smile. Now he just lapses into sullen silence.

The morning they are due to arrive, after a fitful night's sleep, as he settles in the gardens attached to the guest apartments to wait, he finds comfort in the thought that even if Louise finds Bucky an unbearable disappointment, at least she'll still have Steve.

He hears the three of them before he sees them, unfamiliar voices speaking English, breaking through the heavy tranquility of the garden. “ - never had such a pleasant flight. D’you know, Steve, I tried to fly a year and a half after 9/11 and I got ‘randomly selected’? A woman my age, do you believe it?”

Steve says something in response, but it’s too low for Bucky to make out.

“But that - what’d you call it, a quinjet? Oh, these apartments are so cute!”

He's already holding his breath by the time they round the corner and step into view. A white-haired woman stands with her arm linked through Steve’s, and there’s another woman bringing up the rear, wheeling a suitcase behind her. Family. His family. Jesus, there were so many years when he had no idea he even had a family. There's a long moment where no one speaks.

“Well, my God,” says the woman - Louise - in a tone of vague surprise more suited to when you manage to solve a particularly hard crossword puzzle. “And there you are.”

She disentangles her arm from Steve's, giving his forearm a little pat as she does so, as if he's the one that needs steadying. She comes closer to Bucky with the unperturbed steadiness of a person who has lived many years and seen enough not to be surprised by all that much anymore.

Now they're standing at arm's length. Bucky still hasn’t moved, or said a word. "My God," Louise says again, this time in little more than a whisper.

Chief among all the reasons this meeting frightened him was the fear that he would be unable to recognize the woman that came as the sister he'd left behind so long ago. But she's looking at him with such surety that it almost doesn't matter whether or not he can recognize a little girl's eyes in an old woman's face. Her recognition is enough for both of them.

"Hi, Lou," he says. His voice sounds small and uncertain.

“Hi, Bucky,” she answers. “You look exactly as I remember.” But then her gaze drifts to his empty shirtsleeve, and she makes a distressed noise in the back of her throat.

“It’s okay,” Bucky says quickly, because he’s not ready to witness her tears. “It doesn’t hurt anymore. I used to have a fake one but I didn’t like it that much.”

She reaches for him with a slender hand, then hesitates a moment, leaving her hand hovering there in midair, as if he’ll burst into nothing if she touches him.

“It’s okay,” he says again, so Louise stretches out her hand to cup his cheek. Even wrinkled and bony as her hand is, it’s soft and cool against his face, and this close she smells like Pond’s Cold Cream. Bucky used to joke he ought to buy stock in it, with the way the four of them went through the stuff, and it’s this absurd flash of memory that brings tears to his eyes. He reaches up to close his hand around hers.

“Are you feeling better?” Louise asks. “Steve - he told me - and I saw it on the news…I know they did terrible things to you. Are you feeling better?” Her voice wavers and then breaks entirely.

Some long buried instinct hates the sight of her upset. Bucky squeezes her hand. “Yeah. I’m much better now, Lou.”

She nods, but she sobs all the same, and closes the last few inches between them to wrap Bucky in her arms. And when he hugs her back and lets his head drop to her shoulder, eyes squeezed shut, it still feels familiar, even though she would have barely come up to his chest the last time he saw her.

“It’s been so long,” she sobs against his shoulder. She pulls away abruptly, still in tears, reaching up to grip his shoulders. “Oh, let me look at you. You look good. I wish they could see you, Mother and Jeannie and Becca.”

He can barely think of how to respond in the face of the tidal wave of her emotion so he just lets it wash it over him, lets the tears course down his face and lets her heart swell enough for the both of them.

“Better late than never, isn’t it?” Lou says, mopping at her face with her free hand. “I knew it, I just knew it, as soon as Steve came back, I knew you couldn’t be far behind. We had our stars in the window for both of you.” She turns to Steve who has been watching the proceedings, teary-eyed but grinning widely. “Thank you,” Louise says.

Steve just shakes his head a little as if to shake off the sudden attention. “What’d I do?”

Louise attempts to scoff at him, but it just comes out like another sob. “You did so much.” She reaches for him with her free hand, her other still gripping Bucky’s shoulder, and as soon as Steve is within reach she grabs his hand and pulls him in with more force than any of them would’ve thought her capable of. And then suddenly they’re all in each other’s arms, Bucky with his cheek against Louise’s wispy hair, Steve resting his head against Bucky’s shoulder, and Louise tucked against them both.

Of course it was Steve who orchestrated this reunion; Steve, who couldn’t have loved the Barnes girls more than if they were his own sisters. The neighborhood kids used to give him shit about it - but then again, what didn’t the neighborhood kids give him shit about? - and Steve would just look them level in the eye and say something like, “Don’t worry, one day you’ll meet a girl that will actually be willing to talk to you,” and then he’d end up giving Bucky a bloody grin.

How could he have ever been afraid he wouldn’t recognize her? It’s that question that echoes endlessly as the three of them settle on a bench in the garden, Louise between the boys, both of her hands clasped in theirs. She looks from one to the other, her face glowing.

“You were always together in my memory,” she says, and then lets out a happy sigh. “You have no idea how wonderful it is to see both of you together again. They never get it right, do they, on TV or in the books. They always make Bucky out to be some kind of sidekick.”

Rather a sidekick than a murderer, he thinks, but doesn’t say it aloud.

“Buck was never anybody’s sidekick,” Steve affirms, and suddenly Bucky understands why this meant so much to him, rekindling these relationships with Jean and Louise, and Peggy. He needs that outside perspective, to cut through the myth and the bullshit of Captain America that the world has put on his shoulders. He needs that connection to the people that knew him before.

“Certainly not!” Louise sniffs. “And you would think he sprung out of the earth fully-formed with the attention they give the family. If we’re lucky, they merge us girls into one sister and call it a day.”

“Would’ve been easier to deal with just one of you,” Bucky mumbles, a smile tugging on his lips, and Louise gives the back of his hand a pinch.

“There was that one miniseries they put out where they had all three of us,” Louise continues. “The little girl they had playing me is much prettier than I was at that age. You saw that one, didn’t you, Steve? It was after the bad business in Manhattan. What channel was that on?” She turns to her daughter, who is watching this all unfold perched on the edge of their luggage. “It was the one with that show we watch, with the dragons and the nudity.”

“Yeah, that was HBO,” she confirms. “They did that Howling Commandos miniseries in 2013.”

“HBO! That’s the one. It was very good,” Louise says. “Very well done.”

Steve is looking at Bucky over Louise’s head, grinning and shaking his head. ‘It was very bad,’ he mouths.

Bucky ducks his head and grins, but now that she has spoken, he has turned his attention to his niece, Grace, the third traveler. She is watching the three of them interact with rapt attention, like a child absorbing stories at her mother’s knee. “Don’t mind me,” she says, her cheeks getting a little red, when she realizes Bucky is watching her watch them.

“Oh, Bucky! I forgot to introduce you to your niece,” Louise says, as if she, too, has only just noticed her daughter’s presence. “This is Grace.”

Grace gives her mother a fond expression, suffused with so much affection it breaks Bucky’s heart a little. “I think he figured that out on his own, Mom,” Grace says. “So have you always been Bucky?”

For a wild second he thinks she’s asking about all of the years when he wasn’t Bucky, when he wasn’t even really a person, until Steve says, “Yeah, that’s how you introduced yourself to me when we were, what, five?”

“That’s all I ever knew you as,” Louise confirms.

“So how did everyone get to calling you Bucky?” Grace asks.

It’s not buried so deep, the way his pre-war memories usually are. This one, he just has to lift and shake off a layer of dirt. “There was this tradition,” he begins slowly, “where the oldest son on our mom’s side was named James.”

“I’ve never heard this story,” says Steve, the honorary Barnes, sounding vaguely offended.

“Then shut up and let me tell it. But our mother’s brother, Jim, kind of ruined it. Something about stealing money from his parents to buy beer?” He looks to Louise for confirmation.

“Oh, I remember hearing that he fathered a child out of wedlock,” Louise says.

“Well, whatever he did. The point is he ruined it. But Ma still wanted to keep up with the tradition.”

“I don’t think they ever called you James, did they?” Louise asks.

He shrugs. “Not that I remember. I think they’d settled on ‘Bucky’ by the time I was old enough to know any better.”

“You and Mom should really talk to Holly sometime,” Grace says. “My cousin,” she adds. “She’s kind of the genealogist of the family. And she’s a journalist.”

“Jeannie’s second kid,” Steve offers quietly.

"Well, you can meet her when you're all better. Grace and I have plenty of room at our house."

There’s a stiff silence that meets this statement, and Louise looks between the three of them, as if daring them to contradict her plans for the future.

"Mom, we talked about this," Grace answers before Bucky can. "Not that you wouldn't be welcome," she adds quickly to Bucky, because she's a good kid. "But I know it's complicated. You coming back to America."

"Enough of this fugitive business," Louise says. "I still don't understand why you two can't just explain the situation."

"It's not that simple, Lou," Steve offers. "If he went back, there'd be a trial."

"Fine, but surely they'd find him innocent. After what you told me, Steve, and based on what I saw on the TV..." She trails off, confidence flagging under the weight of their serious expressions. "Jim, Becca's son, he hired this brilliant lawyer to take care of our affairs..."

"I think this case might be a little beyond him, Mom," Grace says quietly.

"There's just no guarantees," Steve adds.

Louise sighs and releases their hands. She places her own wrinkled hands in her lap. "No, I suppose there aren't." But then a moment later she looks up at the three of them and he's startled by the fire in her expression; not so much at the presence of it, but at how much it reminds him of their mother. "But there weren't any guarantees either of you would ever come back, and yet here you are, hm?"

"It's not the same thing, Lou," he says quietly.

"Maybe, maybe not. But you two taught me not to back down, even when the boys are bigger than you, and I think you're both just being cowards." With this, she gets to her feet, quite spryly for a woman her age after such a long journey, and turns to leave the garden.

"Mom, where are you going," Grace calls after her with a barely concealed sigh.

"I'm taking a walk," Louise huffs without turning back.

"There's that Barnes temper," Steve says, equal parts fond and exasperated. Grace turns back and gives him a nod with an expression that says 'you have no idea.'

"She's not really mad, though, just disappointed," Grace adds, almost apologetically.

Louise seemed pretty angry to Bucky, but then he looks up and looks over at her daughter, the spitting image of her aunt Jean, even with with the stripe of gray hair at her roots. Perhaps he’s no longer qualified to say anything about what his sister may or may not be feeling. Louise was a girl on the cusp of teenagehood the last time Bucky saw her. What did he have on the daughter that had spent a lifetime with her? “Maybe you’re right. You’ve known her longer than I have.”

Grace’s expression shifts into one of sympathy. “Maybe, but I think you should go talk to her.”

He finds that she has not gone far. Louise is still in the gardens, intently watching a little bird with brilliant yellow plumage hopping among the bushes. It takes off at his approach, and Louise straightens up.

"This certainly isn't Brooklyn, is it," she says. She turns to face him. "My God," she says, for the third time. "I’ll never get used to it. You just being there."

"Lou - "

"I'm sorry. I don't think you're a coward. I shouldn't have said that. I can't even begin to imagine what you've been through."

He doesn't answer at first, just crosses the distance between them until they are standing shoulder to shoulder. "I don't want you to imagine it."

"It's just...it's only that we missed you so much." Something about the matter of fact way she says it breaks his heart.

"I missed you too. I always did," he manages.

"But...Steve told me you'd lost all your memories."

"Yeah. But even when I couldn't remember anything, I think I still missed you. All of you. I just didn't realize what I was missing."

"Oh darling," she sighs, and leans in to hug him again. She was always so easy with her affections, he remembers, but perhaps that was the fault of the rest of them for indulging her so much, the baby of the family. She pulls away and frowns up at him. "You remember now, though, don't you?"

"Mostly. Some of it's still fuzzy."

She grins. The wrinkles around her mouth deepen and her teeth are yellow with age. But she's all Lou, always the joker, when she says, "oh, is that all? Bucky, I'm fuzzy on what I had for breakfast this morning." He rolls his eyes, and maybe she’s expecting him to fire back a quip of his own, because suddenly her expression grows serious. "Are you happy here?" she asks.

It feels like a trick question, even though he knows it isn't. She wants the answer to be yes, but how can it be? How can he deserve it? "It's not really about being happy. It's...it's peaceful here."

Louise nods thoughtfully. "That is what you need right now, isn't it. I suppose they wouldn't let you alone if you came home. God knows they've bothered us enough over the years. Drove Mother to an early grave." He cringes at this nonchalant statement, delivered with the wistful hindsight of one who is far enough away from grief, but Louise doesn't seem to notice. "Are they kind to you here, at least?"

That question is easier to answer. "Yeah, Lou. Everyone's great. Probably nicer than I really deserve."

"Nonsense," she scoffs. "Steve told me the king himself invited you here."

He doesn't know how much Steve told her of the circumstances that led up to that invitation, so he just nods. "T’Challa’s a good guy."

"And he's not hard on the eyes, either. Do you think I'll get to meet him before we have to leave? You have a grand-niece that just graduated with a degree in international business, you know."

He chuckles aloud at this. "I'm pretty sure he's taken, Lou. What, you actually came here to matchmake, is that it?"

"Don't be silly," she says, slipping her hand through his. "I'm here for you, of course."

When they return, they find that Steve and Grace have moved from the garden into the apartment and are in the process of raiding his kitchenette. "It was a long flight," Grace says apologetically. Bucky just shrugs in response. They made him so he didn’t need to eat often, and so even now most of the food he has is non-perishable. Besides, Louise and Grace are guests, and family to boot. If anything he’s embarrassed at the sorry state of his pantry, minimal though it is. Steve is already rooting around in the small refrigerator.

“Who made this?” he asks, peeling up the corner of a tupperware container of lentil stew and taking an experimental sniff.

“I did,” Bucky huffs. There was a woman, another guest in the apartments, a high-ranking member of the river tribe, and she’d shared a few recipes with him while they were neighbors.

“Neither of you were ever good cooks, as I recall,” Louise says.

Both Bucky and Steve launch immediately into protests. “We never wrote any cookbooks, but it’s not like we burned the apartment down,” Steve says.

They did get by all right in those days, and even now, so far removed from them, there’s something that stirs in him that maybe goes beyond memory, or maybe it’s just part of being human, sitting around and sharing a meal, even if it’s random leftovers, a couple of papaya from his last excursion to the market, and peanut butter sandwiches.

Bucky gets up and starts the dishes without even thinking, like when he and Steve shared an apartment and they traded chores. He’s a little slower now, though, with one hand, but, as he reminds himself often, it’s better than the alternative.

“Do you need any help?” Grace offers. Steve and Louise have already moved on to coffee in the garden. Bucky’s in no rush. Still, he gets why Grace is offering.

“Nah. They can get started on the trip down Memory Lane without me.”

“At least let me dry?” Grace insists, brandishing a clean towel at him, and Bucky relents. As they work in silence, Bucky becomes aware of Grace’s eyes on him. It’s not necessarily an unfriendly gaze, but all the same, he draws away from her a little bit.

“I’m sorry,” Grace says, shaking her head a little. “I don’t mean to stare. My mom had a picture of you on the mantel in the house I grew up in. I got older, but that photo never changed. And now here you are. It’s just a little weird,” she says again.

But they trained him so well to read body language and there's no mistaking the way she keeps shifting her weight from one foot to the other or the way she keeps worrying her bottom lip with her teeth. "Are you afraid of me?" he asks, quietly, even though he doubts there’s any chance they’d be overheard.

Grace pauses mid-wipe. "I - not really - not now that I've seen her with you."

"She's not afraid." It's a statement, and he's careful not to make it sound like an accusation.

Grace doesn’t answer at first, just dries another couple of spoons. “There’s a lot of really messed up stuff about you out there,” she says finally. “On the Internet, you know? And I had to stop reading it because it was important to her to come.” She laughs a little, dryly and humorlessly. “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but all of us cousins are struggling a bit with the idea that the legendary uncle none of us met was forced into assassinating people while we hearing stories about him.”

How could he take it the wrong way? It’s almost a relief to meet another person that invites him into her home even as she shrinks away from him, that’s giving him a chance solely because it’s important to another.

“You’re skeptical. It’s smart. I would be, in your place. You want to protect her.”

Grace is nodding. “I’m relieved to hear you say that. But I guess that’s your struggle, huh? Always trying to earn the trust of the people that won’t give it and trying to prove yourself worthy of the people that freely give it to you. In a way, it’d be easier if they hated you.”

Sometimes it feels that the way Steve - and now Louise - treats him is born more out of willful ignorance than a conscious decision to look past the uncountable atrocities he committed while unable to break free of his conditioning. “How much - did Lou do any reading?” he asks quietly, even though that’s not really the question he wants to ask. But Grace is obviously smart, too, and judging by the sideways glance she gives Bucky, she’s picked up on his unasked question. Unfortunately, her initial answer is no more satisfying than when he attempted to ask Steve the same thing.

“I don’t know,” Grace answers. “I don’t think so. But even if she did. It just means so much to her to have you back. I get the feeling that it really impacted the four of them, your death, and Steve’s too, but especially Mom. She was at such an impressionable age.”

He remembers her clinging to him like a child with her gangly teenage limbs. He remembers hoping her sisters would continue to look after her, baby Louise, so far behind the rest of them.

Grace sighs a little, pulling Bucky out of his flashes of memory. She smooths the now-damp towel on the countertop. “I guess you ought to hear this story, at least as best as I can tell it. You are her brother. So Mom came out of the war…a little lost. She met my father when she was very young. He turned out to be, I guess, a real asshole. Even now my brother Charlie refuses to talk about him. I’ve gotten this story in bits and pieces over the years. I don’t know exactly what he did or what he was like, but I know he got physical with Mom and Charlie at least a few times.”

Sometimes he has these flashes of memory of being himself and the Asset at the same time, and they feel like the dreams where you are both yourself and floating above yourself watching the action unfold. He feels like that now, soapy rag still clutched loosely in his hand, as he listens to Grace tell this terrible story, of a past for his baby sister he’s powerless to do anything about now. Some of this must show on his face, because Grace scowls a little. “I know. He got himself killed in a bar fight, and three weeks later Mom found out she was pregnant with me. So she’s rid of this jerk, but she’s a newly single mother with a five-year-old and another on the way. She was in a bad place then.”

“Our sisters? And our Ma?” His own voice echoes strangely in his ears.

“Well, yeah, of course they helped as much as they could, but they had their own lives and families. Ultimately it was up to her. She told me when I was a kid and we had some stupid fight, she told me that when she was in labor with me she realized she was never going to be able to raise us right until she forgave my father.” Suddenly Grace smiles fondly, and Bucky can see all three of the girls then in the warm smile that spreads across his niece’s face. “That’s why she named me Grace. She told me it was a reminder for herself, that forgiveness is as much for you as it is for the other person, and about second chances and how they can come from strange places.”

They’re both standing stock still in the kitchen, as if the weight of Grace’s words were a physical barrier neither of them could pass. Bucky doesn’t trust himself to speak, so he doesn’t try to. Grace shrugs, discomfited by his silence and perhaps concerned that telling him this story was the wrong thing to do. “The point of all that was, I guess, you should understand that it doesn’t matter what she does or doesn’t know about what you did. She learned to forgive you for it a long time ago.”

And suddenly murder seems like a tiny black spot on his soul in comparison to the crime of not being there when his family needed him the most. They were okay anyway, Steve had assured him, but what did Steve know? He’d been a block of ice at the time.

“Were you okay?” he manages to ask, forcing the words past the tightness in his chest.

Grace frowns, not understanding the question; but then suddenly her face widens into a gentler, sadder version of the smile he as seen her direct towards her mother. “Yeah, Bucky. I think we all made out okay.”

He gets it, why she felt the need to tell him that story, but he can’t help but wish she’d saved it for another night. The shared warmth of the afternoon is just gone, replaced by a dull aching sense of loss. He tries not to let it show, tries to nod along as Louise and Grace duly "ooh" and "aah" at the sunset, but he finds himself staring into the murky depths of his coffee cup more often than not.

"You okay?" Steve asks eventually, and he just nods. Steve seems unconvinced, but just then Grace saves him further scrutiny by yawning loudly.

"Jet lag is the worst," she announces, before kissing her mother on the cheek and wishing them good night. Steve, ever the gentleman, stands and follows her, offering to set up the fold-out bed in the living room. Whether her good timing was on purpose or not, he doesn't know, but he thinks she gives him a final meaningful glance as she slips out of the garden and back into the apartment.

"Sure, don't let the one-armed guy help," he quips after them.

Louise chuckles. "Did you and Grace find anything to talk about?"

"She told me what her father was like," he says to the empty mug still held loosely in his hand. When this does not get the reaction he wanted, he looks up sharply. "Does Steve know?"

"All I ever told Steve was that I was unhappily married once," Louise says. "And you needn't get so cranky about it. I haven't lied, or kept anything a secret. It happened a long time ago."

"Not to me." And shit, but Steve is right, it hurts to face these wounds that should be old and long-healed. He hangs his head so that he doesn't have to keep looking at her face. "Lou, I should've - I was supposed to be there - I'm sorry." His voice breaks on the last word. Feels like he's cried more in the last few weeks than in the whole rest of his life.

"There he is," Louise says very softly, and she leans forward to place her soft wrinkled hand over his. “That’s my brother. I kept seeing glimpses of him today. The world’s burdens were always to be carried on your shoulders, hm? Steve’s like that too, but I think you’re the worst about it out of the two of you. Bucky, look at me.”

He does, and almost wishes he hasn’t; her eyes are so unbearably kind. “I know you would’ve been there looking out for us like always if you could’ve,” Louise continues. “You don’t have to apologize for that, or anything else. Of course we’ve missed you. It was almost unbearable at first. But the world spun on without you. The only thing you have to do now is figure out where you fit into it.”

“You’re too good, you know that?” he says hoarsely.

“And you’re better than you give yourself credit for.”

Would she still sit there and talk about his supposed goodness if she really knew what he'd done? Sure, Steve and Shuri and the doctors could talk to him about brainwashing and torture and how he could never be considered responsible and he could be right there with them, logically, but maybe just as Steve struggled to make people understand that the last eighty years were compressed into a few hours, days, weeks for him, maybe Bucky’s struggle is to make them understand that it was still his hands pulling the trigger, still his mind where those memories live.

He thinks about what Grace said, that it would be easier if they hated him, and she's right. It was certainly easier, on the run after D.C., to tell himself a fiction that nearly dying at Bucky’s hands would be enough to get Steve to give up. He told himself there was no point in trying to be any better than the monster the world, Steve surely included, already knew him to be.

That's part of it, then, when Louise tells him he must figure out his place in this world. It's not about nodding and accepting it when people that love him say things he can't believe, like that it wasn't his fault or that he's a good person. It's about the challenge of living up to the version of himself that they see.

He turns his hand over in her grasp so that he can give her fingers a gentle squeeze. "It's not like I wouldn't want to come home sometime," he says quietly. "Meet the other kids," he adds, though it feels a little weird to refer to anyone around Grace's age as a kid.

Louise's eyes are shining. "Do you know, we're going to have a great-grandniece soon? Jim's son's wife is due in two months."

No, maybe the future isn't really that bad after all. "We're old, Lou," he whispers.

“Yes, we are,” Louise whispers back, leaning in, and they stay like that long after the fireflies begin to wink in the distance.