Chapter 2: The Cyclone
List of things Steve Rogers has done in the month of May, as kept by Steve Rogers on the back page of his sketchbook because Sam told him to write it down and he didn't want to admit he'd need to:
Fixed radiator (twice).
Learned to make Mrs. Delgado's rice, badly.
Stopped a guy from stealing a bodega's tip jar on Richards Street. Did not throw anything. Did not chase him more than a block. Bought him a sandwich after, which Sam says is either very Christian or very weird.
Went to a museum by himself. The Captain America exhibit at the Smithsonian has a new wing. He is in it. He went to the Brooklyn Museum instead and looked at Sargent for an hour.
Drew Bucky asleep on the floor, nine times. Hid the drawings.
That last one he crosses out, then holds the page up to the light, decides you can still read it, and tears the whole page out and puts it in his pocket. He'll burn it later. Or keep it. One of the two.
It's Bucky's idea, which is how Steve knows it's a test.
"Coney Island," Bucky says on a Saturday, out of nowhere, standing at the counter cutting a plum into eighths with a paring knife he has no business being that precise with. He eats plums like they owe him something. He picked it up in Wakanda, along with a fondness for goats Steve still doesn't understand. "Let's go."
"Now?"
"You got somewhere to be? The radiator's been real quiet."
Steve looks at the scanner on the windowsill. It's been unplugged for six days. He's been very proud of himself about that, in a way he's aware is stupid. "Sure," he says. "Coney Island."
The F train is the F train. It was the F train in 1940, too, or close enough, and the car still sways the same way coming out of the tunnel into the light past Smith and Ninth, and Steve feels it in his stomach, that old lurch. He's standing because Bucky's standing. Bucky's standing because there's a guy at the end of the car in a hoodie who keeps glancing over, and Bucky's put himself between that guy and the rest of the car without seeming to move at all. Steve knows because he did the same thing two stops ago. They are a matched set of paranoid old men. The guy in the hoodie gets off at Avenue X with a skateboard and never looks back.
"We should get a hobby," Steve says.
"This is the hobby. We're doing it."
The boardwalk is loud and bright and smells like sunscreen and fry oil and the ocean, and for a second Steve stops so fast that a guy on rollerblades nearly takes him out at the knees. It's not the same. Of course it's not. Half the old rides are gone; there are condos where Steeplechase used to be and a baseball stadium and a giant ad for an energy drink. But the Wonder Wheel is right there, turning, painted the same red and white, and past it, rising up like the skeleton of something prehistoric, white wooden lattice against the blue: the Cyclone.
Bucky has stopped beside him.
"Huh," Bucky says.
"Yeah."
"Remember when I made you ride it?"
Steve remembers. He remembers it in the specific way the serum lets him remember things: not just the picture, but the whole of it. The heat of that August, 1939, the nickel Bucky spent that Steve knew he didn't have, Bucky's hand closing around his wrist to pull him through the turnstile. The first drop, which nearly stopped his heart for real. The fact that Bucky laughed the whole way down, head back, hair coming loose from all that pomade, and how Steve, white-knuckled and gasping, had turned his head on the second hill to look at him instead of the track.
"Yeah," Steve says. "And I threw up."
"On my shoes. My good shoes."
"You told me they were your good shoes after. You told everyone in the neighborhood they were your good shoes. They were not your good shoes."
"They were the only shoes I had. That makes them the good shoes."
They're grinning at each other like idiots on the boardwalk. Steve can feel it, how stupid his face must look. Bucky's grin is lopsided, one corner higher than the other, and it's the first time Steve has seen it in so long that he forgets to breathe for a second, and he hasn't forgotten to breathe since 1943.
"Come on," Bucky says. "Let's see if you can keep your lunch down this time."
They don't get on.
They get to the front of the line, and the attendant working the gate, who is maybe twenty and has a nose ring and absolutely no idea who either of them is, says, "Two?" And Steve says yes, and Bucky says nothing. Steve turns and Bucky is standing very still with his gloved left hand flexing at his side, looking at the lap bar on the car.
It's a padded steel bar. It comes down over your thighs and locks with a clank. That's all it is. The car in front of theirs clanks shut, and Bucky's whole body goes tight, a tiny flinch that nobody else on the platform would ever notice.
Steve knows exactly what it reminds him of. He's read the files. He's seen the chair.
"Actually," Steve says to the attendant, "you know what, we're gonna let these folks go ahead." He steps back out of the line, taking Bucky with him by the elbow, smiling his most harmless, most apple-pie smile at the family behind them. "You go on. We're just old. Bad hearts."
The dad gives him a weird look. Steve keeps smiling until they're down the ramp and back on the boardwalk, and then he lets go of Bucky's elbow and they walk without talking until they hit the railing and the beach spreads out below them, crowded with umbrellas and towels and gulls.
"Sorry," Bucky says to the ocean.
"Don't."
"I wanted to. I did. I thought about it all morning. I figured if I could do it, I'd write it down, and then the next time she asks me what I did this week I'd have something other than 'ate plums and watched Steve fix things.'"
"You could tell her about the dish."
"What dish?"
"You brought Mrs. Delgado's dish back on Thursday. Washed. I saw. That's huge, Buck. Nobody brings her dish back. She's been running out of dishes since 1971."
Bucky laughs, a little cracked. He leans his forearms on the railing. The glove on his left hand catches the light. "It was a bar," he says. "It's a stupid roller coaster bar. I fought the Hulk. I fought you on a helicarrier. And I can't sit down and let a nineteen-year-old with a nose ring lock a bar over my legs."
"So we don't ride the Cyclone."
"I'm supposed to be getting better."
"You are." Steve turns around so his back is against the railing and he can see Bucky's face. "You think I'm getting better? I had to unplug a police scanner, Bucky. I carry it around the apartment unplugged. I put it in the fridge yesterday so I'd stop looking at it."
Bucky turns his head. "You put it in the fridge?"
"Behind the orange juice."
"I thought that was a weird Tupperware."
"It's a police scanner."
"Jesus Christ, Steve."
"I know."
"You know the cops don't care if you listen. It's not illegal. You could listen all day."
"It's not about the cops." He makes himself say it, the way he made himself walk away from a house in Washington in 1949, one foot in front of the other. "It's that if I listen, I'll go. And if I go, I'm Captain America again, and I gave that away. I gave it to Sam because he's better at it than I ever was, because he does it for the right reasons, and if I go running every time someone yells on a scanner then I didn't really give it away. I just put it down for a while." He looks at his hands. "And then I'm right back where I was. Where I've been since I was twenty-five. Throwing myself at things. Because that's easier than..."
He stops.
"Than what," Bucky says.
Than this, Steve doesn't say. Than standing still long enough for somebody to look at me. Than finding out what I am when I'm not useful. Than wanting something just for me.
"Than figuring out what to have for dinner," he says instead, and Bucky gives him a look that means he knows exactly what Steve just swallowed, and lets him have it anyway. That's the thing about Bucky. He always lets him have it.
They ride the Wonder Wheel instead. Bucky picks a swinging car without discussing it, the kind that slides on rails as the wheel turns and lurches you out over nothing. No lap bar. Just a cage with a door and a little bench on each side. Bucky sits across from him with his knees almost touching Steve's, and the car climbs, and halfway up it slides forward on its track with a shriek of metal and drops a sickening foot and a half, and Bucky's hand shoots out and closes on Steve's knee.
The metal one. Steve can feel the plates through the glove and his khakis, a careful pressure, not hard at all.
"You okay?" Steve says.
"Fine." Bucky doesn't move his hand. "Just. Gravity's rude."
They come up over the top of the wheel and the whole of it opens out at once: the ocean going silver to the horizon, the long arm of the Rockaways, the beach like a spilled bag of confetti, and behind them Brooklyn, all of it, every rooftop and water tower stretching back toward the towers of Manhattan where the light is going gold. The car rocks gently. It's quiet up here. The noise of the boardwalk falls away underneath them like it's somebody else's day.
"I remember something," Bucky says.
Steve looks at him. Bucky isn't looking at the view. He's looking at his own hand on Steve's knee, like it belongs to somebody else.
"I've been getting pieces back. Dr. Raynor says that's normal, it comes in whatever order it wants. Most of it's garbage. Some of it's bad." He swallows. "This one isn't."
"Okay."
"It's the night before I shipped out. 1943. We went to the Stark Expo. You remember? You snuck off to the recruiting booth again, and I had those two girls with me, and I left them by the dance hall to come drag you out."
"I remember."
"Before that. Before I found you. I was standing outside that dance hall by myself for a minute, and I had this thing I was going to say to you. I'd been carrying it around for years. I'd practiced it. I was gonna say it before I got on the boat because I thought, what if I don't come back, what if I never get to." Bucky's jaw works. "I can remember practicing it. I can remember exactly how scared I was. I can remember my hands shaking so bad I had to put them in my pockets."
The car rocks. The wheel starts to turn again, carrying them over the top and toward the long slide down.
"What was it?" Steve hears himself ask. "What were you going to say?"
Bucky lifts his head. His eyes are wet and furious and, under all of it, frightened in a way Steve has not seen since a train in the Alps.
"That's the part I can't get back," Bucky says.
And the car lurches forward on its rails, out over the empty air, and drops.