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It was raining in Wakanda.
It rained a lot in Wakanda during the rainy season, in a way that Bucky was still getting used to— solid sheets of rain that never seemed to let up, the constant tapping of rain on his roof. There was no leaking, of course– the Wakandans built everything to withstand and endure. The dirt paths outside had long since become muddy rivulets and small streams, but it was warm and dry inside his hut.
It was the custom during the rainy season for the villagers to move to farms at higher ground, and Bucky had offers to travel with them. The villagers, mostly retired soldiers and Dora Milaje with families of their own, were all aware of his identity, of his past, but strangely, it was easier to live among them because of that, not harder. They’d all seen violence, seen war and horror and found a way to live in spite of that. They took him as he was, gave him space when he needed it, and adopted him into the rhythms and routines of village life when he didn’t.
But after confirming that the village wasn’t going to wash away, Bucky had decided to stay. He wasn’t entirely by himself—one of the village cats had decided his hut was now hers, and a couple of stray goats and chickens that had escaped being rounded up made up the entirety of village life for the next few weeks. Bucky didn’t care. He had food, a dry, warm place to live, and in a pinch, he figured he could fit the animals in the hut too. To judge by the clucking of one of the hens in the corner, she didn’t mind.
Bucky finished feeding the goats, and walked back inside of the hut, stripping off his damp clothes as he went. He hung them up so they could dry and padded into the bathroom, naked. After a hot shower, he dried himself off with a towel and thumbed a bead on his kimoyo bracelet. “Hey Stevie,” he murmured. “You around?”
***
“Your bead’s flashing,” Natasha observed from the other side of the quinjet.
Steve dug out his own kimoyo bracelet—a twin to Bucky’s, given to him by Shuri (with a sly wink, of course) on his last visit—from his knapsack and wondered how Natasha had seen it when he hadn’t. But it was Natasha, after all. “You gonna answer that, man?” Sam drawled from the bunk opposite him.
“I hadn’t planned on ignoring it,” Steve replied. He could feel Wanda laughing at him from her own bunk. “I’m gonna—” he gestured towards the door.
“Yeah, yeah,” Natasha said with a grin. “Say hi to lover-boy for us.”
Steve didn’t even bother responding they weren’t lovers, and stepped out into the chill desert night. “I’m here, Buck,” he said, though where “here” was, he couldn’t have said. They were somewhere, heading to someplace, and Steve was beyond tired, in a way that had nothing to do with physical exhaustion.
But it was going to be over soon. Steve focused on that, or tried to. The Accords had been repealed, and the rogue Avengers had been pardoned. They could go home now, and all of them had, except for the group on the quinjet. They had just one last mission to complete, ensuring the delivery of food and medicines to a refugee camp, and that would be the last mission.
They’d all made plans, in the days since the announcement of their pardons after the repeal of the Sokovian Accords. Natasha was going home to Clint and Laura and their kids, Wanda and Sam were heading to his family in Louisiana, to try and give Wanda the family stability she’d entirely lacked for much of her young life.
And soon, Steve would be home, with the only man who had ever been home. He smiled a bit at that, and thumbed the bead that opened the secure communications queue. “Hey Buck, I’m here.”
The hologram of Bucky grinned back and Steve noticed that he was naked. “Sorry,” Bucky said, entirely unrepentant, “you caught me at a bad time.”
Steve chuckled. “Funny that, since you’re the one who called me.” He reached out to touch the hologram, wanting to touch---if only for a moment—the lazy path of a few water drops sliding down Bucky’s bare chest. “You’re all right, though? Not swimming down the streets yet?”
“Eh, it’s just a lot of mud. You’ll see.”
The thought warmed him, shaking off the desert’s chill, the firm assurance that yes, of course, they would be seeing each other soon. “Are you okay, Stevie?” Bucky asked softly. “You look tired.”
Steve hadn’t seen an actual mirror in weeks, but he’d caught a few glimpses of himself in reflective surfaces and knew that the weariness he felt was engraved on his face. “Don’t worry.”
“Tall order,” Bucky answered with a half-twist of a smile that brought Steve back to the days when they had both been so much younger. “They treating you right?”
Bucky never asked where they were or what they were doing, and Steve never went into specifics. Their missions were highly unofficial—sometimes acting at Nakia’s behest or T’Challa’s, sometimes for missions that required the kind of experience and skills that four ex-Avengers could provide, but which Wakanda couldn’t officially acknowledge—and Steve wasn’t about to risk making Bucky a witness, even accidentally, to knowledge of any of their missions on the grey sides of the law. “About as well as you’d expect. Sam says to thank you for the coffee. He was getting sick of what passed for it in..” he trailed off, delicately. “...wherever we were.”
“I’m sure,” Bucky said, dry as the Sahara. Steve smothered a grin behind his hand. Yeah, he never had been able to hide anything from Bucky. “Oh, hey, Ayo said the coordinates have changed. This channel still secure?”
Shuri’s tech never did anything as mundane as fail unexpectedly but he appreciated the reasons for Bucky’s caution just the same. Steve thumbed a different bead on his bracelet– the one Shuri had provided for just this reason. “Let me check the settings.” The communications bead lit up, scarlet in the depths of a desert night, flashed twice, then subsided to its usual blue. “We’re good. What are the coordinates?”
Bucky rattled off a short series of numbers that Steve recognized as being on a hill next to the village. “Is Ayo worried about a flood?” Are you in danger? he wanted to ask, but didn’t. Bucky was there and Steve was…wherever they all were, and there was nothing he could do.
“Calm down, punk,” Bucky told him. “This is the landing site near the border. They change them every so often.”
“Oh,” Steve said, feeling foolish. Bucky was fine.
“I’m fine,” Bucky stated, more softly. He glanced around him and Steve could just barely hear the tapping of rain on the thatched roof. “I can’t wait for you to see it, Stevie. It’s a different place with everyone gone.”
This time, Steve did reach out to touch the holograph. “I’ll be there soon. And you can show me…”
Bucky gave a half smile as though he could feel the ache under Steve’s words. “Everything, Stevie. Everything .”
***
The rain stopped at dawn two days later. Bucky knew enough to know it wasn’t going to last, but in the time he had, he made sure the goat’s feed was dry, the chicken had a way to get into her coop without swimming and as for the cat? Well, she was a cat and he didn't want to move her from her position at the foot of his bed, so he didn’t.
He had one visitor just as he was seeing the goat into her temporary pen– Ayo, which he might have expected. “Ayo,” Bucky said with his head inclined in greeting. “Will you come in?” he asked in Wakandan. “I promise it’s dry inside and I have some water heating up for tea.”
She inclined her head in return. “That would be well, James, thank you.”
Ayo followed him back inside his hut, waited until he’d poured her tea just the way he’d learned she liked it before she spoke. “He’s on his way back here now.”
Ah. Steve and the others had been acting on Wakanda’s behalf this time. Aloud, Bucky asked, “He’s…well, then, he and others?” It took everything he had not to ask for details, but it was a hard thing.
Ayo took a sip of her tea. “Some bruises and scrapes, but their job was well done and the problem no longer exists.” She placed her cup on the end of a carved table. “Is there nothing you require before he returns to you, James?”
“I have a home,” Bucky told her, astonished. “I have my mind back, for the first time in almost a century. What else could I ask for?”
She gazed at him– the intense hawk-like stare of every Wakandan woman he’d met—and smiled faintly. “My days as your guard are coming to a close,” Ayo told him, “and not because this was an assignment.” She paused. “You were never an assignment, James. I want you to realize this. You were and are a warrior who needed time and space to heal, and you’re well on your way down that path. I was honored to be a part of your healing.” A faint wry smile crossed her face. “People have needs and wants, James. Truly, is there nothing you might want?”
Steve, Bucky thought but that was a normal, everyday ache.. “I… was happy enough to see the sunlight once Shuri brought me out of cryo.”
From under the folds of her armor, Ayo produced a small dark bead. Bucky recognized it as a kimoyo bead, inactive because it was untethered to the Wakandan intranet. She held it out to him and smiled. “Then I will give this to you. You are free, James. Place this bead on your bracelet and the last of your security restrictions will be removed.”
“I’m free,” he said softly, trying to wrap his mind around the very concept. He had in no way been treated like a prisoner in Wakanda, but as the king’s honored guest. There’d always been a concern in the back of his mind that such a blessing couldn’t last forever, that one day T’Challa might have to ask him to leave.
“The king has granted you sanctuary. You and…” Ayo made an amused sound “...any who might choose to join you. There are documents formalizing his decision which have been sent to your communications queue.”
The bead slid onto his bracelet almost of its own volition; it lit up a brilliant blue, then subsided to the warm grey of the other beads. Bucky stared at it a few moments, then looked across at Ayo. “Are any of the markets open?”
***
In one of the pockets on his belt, nestled amidst the emergency glucose and other things Steve might need to survive, he kept a small rounded stone. It was a carving Bucky had made with one of the villagers, smoothed by brute persistence and care into a talisman for his protection, according to local belief. “They say it’ll tell you when to come home,” Bucky told him, “but I just want you to be safe.” And the memory of a thousand times when Bucky had looked out for his safety had made Steve hold him tighter. He might not have appreciated it then, but now…
Steve parted from his friends at the Wakandan border. It had all been arranged through Shuri that there would be a flitter waiting just over the border with the appropriate Wakandan flight clearances, along with his visa and all other necessary paperwork. It was still a walk, and while Natasha could have dropped him off directly in front of Bucky’s village, Steve needed some time with his thoughts before seeing Bucky, some time to orient himself. The others seemed to sense this and with hugs and a muttered “Don’t you dare be a stranger” from Sam and Wanda, the quinjet lifted off into the greyish light of dawn.
There was nothing to prepare him for where he stood now. Maybe, he reflected, in some kinder universe where they’d both been demobbed and come back home to Brooklyn, that other universe’s Steve would have known how to return permanently to his lover, but Steve was completely at sea. He’d said many times that he would one day stop fighting and come home, but this was the reality.
The lone screeching cry of a hawk echoed overhead, one last cry before the storms resumed, before it returned home. Steve chuckled. The hawk had its nest, but Steve didn’t need a stone to tell him when to come home.
***
They were running late, Bucky realized, though “late” was relative when Steve returned from missions that didn’t officially exist. So he busied himself cleaning and reorganizing his simple hut into a configuration that should work better for two people. The hen clucked at him from a nearby shelf and the cat opened sleepy green eyes to study him, then went back to sleep. Bucky felt maybe they were sitting in judgment, but laughed, realizing he didn’t care. Steve was coming. Steve was coming home, to stay.
He turned to the kitchen, taking stock of what he had stored, and what he had purchased once Steve settled in and was more used to Wakandan food. There was a decent plot of land outside that might make for a good-sized garden…
He laughed suddenly. Steve wouldn’t care what the place looked like– they’d lived together in far worse places, after all. What was he worrying about?
And then at length, he heard it: the tread of Steve’s steps, maybe a mile or so away. Nobody else walked like him, or ever had. Even though his spine was straight and he’d gained pounds and inches so long ago, Bucky felt he would know his walk in a thousand universes, that there was not a single inch of his man that he would not know.
Thunder rumbled in the distance. Bucky sniffed the air, feeling the sudden onset of humidity. It was going to rain again, and soon. He retrieved the one item he’d purchased at the market, and went outside to wait for Steve.
***
The rain began to fall in a splatter of mud and moisture just as Steve crossed into the village proper. And in the distance was Bucky, standing under a huge, brightly colored umbrella. It was the kind of thing that should have seemed ridiculous— a giant beach umbrella in the middle of a Wakandan village—and Steve laughed and laughed, the kind of joy he’d almost forgotten how to feel. The space between them was almost nothing as Steve rushed up to meet him, heedless of the squelching of the mud or the water that dripped from his long hair into his eyes.
“Hey,” Bucky said roughly, holding him tightly. “Hey. You want to come inside, or…?”
Steve looked across at Bucky’s face, saw the light from the colored fabric panels of the umbrella casting pastel shadows, and grinned. “Nah. Can we…just stay here for now?”
Bucky pushed back a sodden lock of hair that had fallen into Steve’s eyes. “Forever. If you’ll have me.”
***
Meanwhile, in a far distant galaxy…
The planet was nameless, dusty and foreboding. The Watcher stood in the shadow of a large red mountain and watched as the severed arm of a would-be tyrant fell to the ground, scattering dirt and blood into the still air. The figure of a woman stood and dropped her weapon, watching dispassionately as the pulse ceased to beat in his throat. “It’s over, Dad,” she said and walked away.
There was something more mechanical than blood or bone in her walk, but her back was straight as she walked with a new purpose to her shuttle, leaving the body of Thanos bleeding into the dirt.
The Watcher smiled. The universe was safe, as it was meant to be. Two old soldiers in yet another galaxy would be able to find shelter in each other for as long as their days lasted.
And Nebula would heal.
THE END.