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“Your friend is most likely dead.” She tells him, watching him throw his coat on over his ridiculous costume.
There’s something tragic in his desperation, and Peggy doesn’t understand that kind of love, not yet, but the way Steve is looking through her, pale with urgency, makes her feel like she should.
Peggy Carter isn't in the business of being wrong. But just this once, it would be nice.
_
Bucky is very, very still and Steve knows, instantly.
“Bucky?” He begs, anyway. Bucky’s stillness does not falter, and Steve feels it building – something like terror – white hot behind his eyes. “Bucky?” He repeats, voice failing like the room has been sucked of oxygen.
Bucky’s face is grey and tracked with tears and grime and small slithers of blood. His eyes are open; still, stoic and unseeing, glassy in the dull light, streaked with burst blood vessels. There are track marks down the exposed skin of his inner-arms and neck where the skin puckers, mottled with bruising.
For a moment, it feels like the fury may burn Steve from the inside out.
He bunches his fists at his sides pathetically and stares down at his best friend’s corpse. Bucky’s bones are sharp in ways they weren’t back in Brooklyn, straining against his skin – the same skin that Steve saw only months ago sun kissed golden, pallid and thin like gauze. Blood has bloomed at his slide, has seeped slowly through his shirt like molasses and has trickled down the metal in rivulets and settled, scarlet and unnatural against the grimy tiles. Steve watches the faint motion of the blood, unsettled slightly by a breeze and the heat, and breathes in the smell of copper, thick and heavy on his tongue.
He sobs, quiet with agony, and reaches to place his hand on Bucky's chest. There is no pulse, and breath doesn't suddenly leak into Bucky's lungs.
Steve wonders how someone so good, so alive, could be so cold so quickly.
Bucky was robbed and this is where they left their haul, the disgusting fucking cowards, beaten and broken on a cold slab of an operating table, lying in a pool of blood.
_
The words ‘love of my life’ get tossed around a lot, Steve thinks. He also thinks about the way Bucky had looked on that table, and for a moment he can think of nothing else but of what must have happened to his body, nothing but ashes in the wreckage.
_
The thing about Bucky is that - was that - he was so devastatingly good; better than Steve could ever be, it felt sometimes, in ways that he can't quite place.
Bucky Barnes was more than a name on a memorial or a body on a metal slab; he was whistling in the morning, the clink of crockery and the smell cheap coffee, calloused hands on his neck. Goodbye kisses. Bucky was pomade, slick suits, plump lips, tender late night smiles over the rim of his cup. Bucky was the rhythm of Steve's breathing, the tapping of toes at the stove, the way he smiled when people were watching and the way he smiled when they weren't. Bucky was fingers in his mouth and rumpled sheets.
Bucky was the love of his life.
_
When the 107th march back home, Peggy thinks, just for a moment, that she has finally been proven wrong. She thinks that perhaps she should have had more faith, more hope, but then Steve comes into view.
And Peggy doesn’t need to ask to understand. There is nobody to Steve’s left, and that says enough on its own.
_
(When Steve was sixteen years old, and so desperately ill and so, so tired, he's asked Bucky, voice tiny and feverish, if he’d miss him when he was gone.
And Bucky had been silent for a long, long time, and when he’d finally spoken, voice level and colder than Steve had ever heard it, he’d said, “Yes.”
Steve hadn’t needed to hear anymore to understand, but Bucky had continued anyway. “I’d miss you to death.” He’d said, so low and earnest that it had hurt, more than any coughing fit or asthma attack.
“Me too.” Steve had whispered back, voice quiet like it was sacred; a promise. “Me too.”)
_
It's a surprise to no one, not really, that when the Valkyrie goes down, Steve goes with it.
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The sketchbook is encased in glass, flipped to a charcoal sketch of a young, untroubled Bucky Barnes. The information plaque declares it as:
[7] portrait of unknown male, thought to be James Barnes, Captain Rogers' pre-War roommate
Steve stares for a long, long time.
"Who was he?" Natasha asks him, eventually, and the softness of her voice is enough to snap him from the trance he had been in. There's a glimmer of something gentle in her expression, and Steve thinks she must have seen the intimacy in the moment caught on paper, for her to look at him like that.
For a moment, he had been there again, the sun leaking through the ratty curtains in tatters, Bucky’s smile, playful, inviting…
He looks back to the display. His cheeks are wet, without him realising it.
Steve wants to say a lot, but the words don't come. "He was... A friend." He explains, finally, though the words don’t feel like justice. "A good friend.” He doesn't move to look away from Bucky’s face, immortalised in sketch.
He doesn’t have anything left to give.
Natasha doesn't press him further, but when they leave she catches him looking back at the drawing of Bucky again. Her eyes are knowing.
_
Steve will think, later, with a certainty that he hasn't had since Bucky died that he should have been the footnote in Bucky's story, not the other way around.
END