Chapter 1: Leaman Place
The building where Steve Rogers was born is a nail salon now.
Bucky stands on the sidewalk with his hands in his jacket pockets and reads the sign twice. GLOSS & GO. WALK-INS WELCOME. There's a neon hand in the window, fingers spread, every nail a different color. Somebody has put a potted fern by the door. It's dying.
"Huh," Steve says.
"Yeah."
"The stoop's the same." Steve points with his chin. "Third step. That chip. That's where I fell and split my lip on the Fourth of July and you told my mother I got jumped by three guys from Flatbush so she wouldn't know I tripped over my own feet."
"You did get jumped by three guys from Flatbush. That was a different Fourth."
"Was it?"
"Steve. You got jumped by three guys from Flatbush every Fourth of July from 1936 to 1941. It was practically a holiday tradition. They probably still have a plaque."
Steve laughs, short and surprised, the way he only laughs when he forgets to be careful. A woman with a stroller edges around them. Two big men standing in the middle of the sidewalk staring at a nail salon: in this neighborhood, in this decade, it probably reads as a breakup.
Bucky watches the neon hand blink. He'd expected to feel something here. That was the point, wasn't it? Dr. Raynor had said it in her office with the bad abstract painting and the bowl of mints nobody ever took. Go back to the places that made you. See who you are when you're standing in them. He'd nodded like he understood. He'd written it in the notebook. GO BACK. Underlined twice.
What he feels, mostly, is that the fern needs water.
"You want to go in?" Steve asks.
"And do what? Get a French tip?"
"I'm just saying. We came all the way out here."
"We live eleven minutes away." He'd timed it. "On foot. At a stroll."
"Still." Steve rubs the back of his neck, and there it is, the thing Bucky has been watching for three weeks. The hand that won't stay still. The eyes that drift to the end of the block, to the intersection, to the woman with the stroller, checking. Checking for what, Bucky wants to ask. There's nothing out here. Nobody's coming. Nobody needs you to throw yourself in front of anything. Which is the whole problem.
"Come on," Bucky says. "I'll buy you a coffee and you can tell me about the chip in the step again."
The apartment is on the fourth floor of a brick building on Van Brunt Street, a block from the water, with a fire escape that faces the harbor if you lean out far enough and don't mind the Port Authority cranes. Steve found it. Steve found it the way he does everything, by deciding it was going to happen and then walking straight at it until it did. He'd come back on the platform that afternoon in the woods outside Tony's house, holding nothing, and he'd looked at Sam and then at Bucky and said, "I need to give this to you," to Sam, and the shield wasn't even there, it was leaning against a tree, and everyone had stood around like idiots for a full minute before Bruce asked, very gently, "Steve, where's the briefcase?"
The briefcase was in 2014. And 2012. And 1970, and wherever the hell Vormir was. Steve had put everything back. Then he'd come home.
Two weeks later he'd shown Bucky a listing on his phone. Two bedrooms, radiator heat, original moldings, no elevator. "I figure," he'd said, "we're both pretty good at stairs."
That was all. No speech. Bucky had looked at the phone and then at Steve's face, the way it was carefully arranged into nothing, and he'd said, "Sure," because the alternative was Wakanda, or a government safehouse in Virginia, or a motel outside a town where nobody knew his face, and none of those places had Steve in them.
Now it's three weeks in and they have a couch, two mismatched chairs, a kitchen table Steve rescued off a curb on Columbia Street and sanded down for an entire Saturday, and a bed in each bedroom. Bucky has slept in his for a total of forty minutes. He sleeps on the living room floor with his back to the wall and a view of the door. Steve hasn't said anything about it. Steve steps over him in the mornings on his way to the kitchen like it's a rug that's always been there.
They come in from the nail salon and the coffee and Steve goes straight to the radiator under the front window.
"It's fine," Bucky says.
"It's knocking."
"It's a hundred-year-old radiator. It's allowed to knock. I'm a hundred-year-old man and I knock."
"You don't knock."
"I creak. Same thing."
Steve is already on his knees with the wrench. He bought the wrench the first day. He's fixed the bathroom faucet, the kitchen drawer that stuck, the hallway light on the third-floor landing that wasn't technically theirs to fix, Mrs. Delgado's garbage disposal, and the front door buzzer, which now works so well it goes off if a truck drives by. There's nothing left to fix. So he's fixing things again.
Bucky sits on the arm of the couch and watches him. He knows that set of shoulders. He knew it when it was ninety pounds of asthma and attitude, and he knows it now, under all the extra muscle the serum stacked on top. The same angle, hunched toward a problem. Back then the problem was a guy twice his size behind the movie theater. Now it's a radiator valve that doesn't need bleeding.
On the windowsill, between a dead basil plant and a coffee mug full of pencils, the police scanner is murmuring. Steve says he bought it to listen to the Yankees games, which are not broadcast on police scanners. It's turned down so low you'd need a super soldier's hearing to catch it. Which is the joke.
"...units responding, 10-52, corner of Court and Union..."
Steve's wrench stops.
"Steve."
"I'm not doing anything."
"You stopped turning the thing."
"I'm thinking about the thing."
"You're thinking about Court and Union."
Steve sits back on his heels. He looks at the scanner for a second, and then, very deliberately, he reaches over and turns it off. The silence is louder than the murmuring was.
"Sam's got New York," Bucky says. "And there's a Spider-Man somewhere in Queens, apparently. And about six hundred cops."
"I know."
"I'm just saying."
"I know, Buck." Steve sets the wrench on the floor. He doesn't pick it back up. "It's not that I want to go. It's that I don't know what I'm supposed to do instead."
It's the most honest thing he's said in three weeks. Bucky files it away. He has a lot of things filed away. That's what the notebook is for, officially. Dr. Raynor gave it to him for the names, the list, the people he owes. And there are names in there, a lot of them, most with a line through them now. But there are other pages, too. Pages she doesn't know about. Pages Steve definitely doesn't know about.
STEVE STILL TAKES HIS COFFEE WITH TOO MUCH SUGAR. SAME AS 1938.
STEVE DREW THE HARBOR FROM THE FIRE ESCAPE. DIDN'T SHOW ME. I SAW ANYWAY.
STEVE LAUGHED AT THE NAIL SALON.
That last one he'll write tonight.
At seven o'clock there is a knock at the door that Bucky recognizes before it finishes: three short raps and a rattle of the knob, because Mrs. Delgado considers locked doors a personal insult.
"Boys." She is four foot ten in orthopedic sneakers and carrying a foil-covered dish that has to weigh half what she does. "I made too much pernil."
"Mrs. Delgado," Steve says, taking it from her, "you made too much pernil on Sunday."
"And I made too much again. I'm old. I forget how many people I'm cooking for. You want me to throw it out? Starving people in the world and you want me to throw it out?"
"No, ma'am."
"Good." She peers past him into the apartment. Her eyes land on Bucky's blanket and pillow, folded against the wall where he left them this morning. Then on the closed door of his bedroom. Then on Steve. Then on Bucky. It takes about two seconds. Bucky has been interrogated by experts, and he has never felt as seen as he does under Mrs. Delgado's reading glasses.
"Hm," she says.
"It's a back thing," Bucky says.
"I didn't say anything."
"You said 'hm.'"
"I'm eighty-one. I say 'hm' about everything. I said 'hm' about the weather this morning." She pats Steve's arm, which is roughly the diameter of her waist. "My husband, God rest him, he slept on the couch for a month when we were first married. You know why?"
Steve, helplessly polite: "Why, ma'am?"
"Because he was a fool," Mrs. Delgado says, "and so was I." And she turns and starts back up the stairs, one hand on the rail, calling over her shoulder, "Bring back my dish this time! I'm running out of dishes!"
The door clicks shut. Steve stands there holding the pernil.
"What," Bucky says, "was that supposed to mean."
"I don't know." Steve's ears are pink. They've been doing that since 1934 and the serum didn't fix it. "She's eighty-one. She says things."
He doesn't sleep. That's not new. What's new is that around two in the morning he hears the window in the front room slide open, and when he gets up off the floor, careful and quiet, the fire escape outside it is occupied.
Steve is sitting on the iron grating in a T-shirt and sweatpants with his sketchbook on his knees and a pencil behind his ear. He isn't drawing. He's looking at the harbor, at the lights of the cranes and the dark water past them, the green speck of the Statue of Liberty way out to the left if you know where to look. He doesn't turn around when Bucky climbs out, but he moves over to make room, which is answer enough.
The grating is cold through Bucky's sweatpants. The city smells like salt and diesel and somebody's late-night fried something. Somewhere a dog is barking at nothing.
"Can I ask you something," Bucky says.
"You're going to anyway."
"Yeah." He looks at the side of Steve's face, the beard he keeps meaning to shave. "Bruce told me where you went. After the stones. He said you had a little time left on the suit, after you put the last one back, and you used it."
Steve doesn't move.
"He said you went to 1949."
For a while there's just the dog and the water.
"I did," Steve says finally. "I went to her door."
Bucky waits. He's good at waiting. He spent seventy years in a freezer; he can wait out a man on a fire escape.
"I stood on the sidewalk outside her house in Washington. It was raining. There was a radio on inside, some big band thing, I don't even remember what song. I could hear her laughing at something. And I had everything I'd ever wanted, right there, the dance, the whole life, all I had to do was walk up the steps and knock." Steve turns the pencil over in his fingers. "And I didn't."
"Why not?"
Steve looks at him then. In the orange light off the harbor his eyes are very blue and very tired and very, very careful, the way they were careful in the woods with the shield leaning against a tree, the way they've been careful every day for three weeks.
"Ask me again," Steve says quietly, "when I know how to say it."
And he picks up the pencil and starts drawing the cranes, and Bucky sits beside him until the sky over the water starts to go gray, and neither of them says another word, and Bucky's heart is going like he just ran from Flatbush.