Chapter Text
The first big, deep belly laugh, the kind that shakes your shoulders, reaches deep inside you and brings up something good – happens at the most unlikely of moments.
He’s been smiling again – even with every awful thing, he’s been smiling. Since he looked up and got to share that memory of worn out old shoes with Steve, it seems like bit by bit it’s getting a little easier to smile. Maybe even to chuckle. But a long, shaking laugh … Bucky wasn’t expecting that so soon.
He and Steve are battered and bruised, dragging each other through the Siberian snow, hoping to somehow get to the Quinjet and go who knows where. There’s no plan, there’s just get to the jet, get out. They make it over a small hill and finally can see the jet – but standing next to the jet, unmistakable in the bright white snow, is the Panther.
Bucky knows, in this second, they are done.
Over the past two years, the sensation of pain has come back to Bucky in waves. The Soldier never felt pain but Bucky – he remembers flashes of it, and in the past two years has sometimes even tried to make himself feel it. But it’s nothing like this – the fight with Stark has not only ripped out his arm, the heavy weight that has balanced his world, but it’s left every part of him thrumming with pain. And though Steve is dragging Bucky with a grim determination, Bucky can see him wince with every step. His face is streaked with blood and he doesn’t even have the shield anymore.
They can’t fight – to be honest, Bucky is impressed they’re both upright and moving forward. He hears Steve take a breath and Bucky hears a shaky rattle in it, which pulls at a memory thread in the back of his mind, Steve used to breathe like that a lot. “On three,” Steve wheezes, “I’m gonna let you go and you run, Buck. You run as far as you can and I’ll engage him. Don’t let him get you.”
And that’s when Bucky laughs.
In this moment, everything falls away. He remembers the Steve who weighed 98 pounds soaking wet getting ready to jump into a fight with guys twice his size because it was the right thing to do – he remembers the Steve who’d get his ass beat for principle, who’d never walk away. Bucky thinks of the times he’d find Steve struggling to stand up and get in a punch, no matter the odds.
And he laughs.
“Stevie, we can barely stand up. You ain’t gonna win.”
Laughter. Pure, genuine laughter. It feels so good. The Soldier could barely remember pain but he certainly never knew laughter. This laughter is Bucky’s. And so … so is Stevie.
These past two years, as Bucky has rebuilt his memories, his self – he’s suspected that. But now he knows. Knows it like he knew how to seamlessly fight with him, tossing that shield back and forth without pause. Knows it like he knew that Steve would stand up even when Stark told him to stand down.
Bucky pulls on the thread of memory and remembers every fight Steve would never walk away from and that little half-smile on Steve’s face, the one he’d get when Bucky was trying to talk some damn sense into him, the one that’s on Steve’s face here in the worst of situations, well Bucky remembers that too.
“I can – I can take him.” Steve gasps out.
“Oh, Stevie. You’re still that same stupid kid,” Bucky hiccups out between laughs.
Steve, his Steve not Captain America, smiles back. A huge, real smile this time. “Look whose talking. You’re the stupid one…jerk.”
Bucky can’t stop laughing. They’re going to die out here in Siberia, but he’s going to die as Bucky Barnes, with his own memories and Stevie beside him and laughter and that is so much more than the Solider could have ever imagined.
And just as Steve is getting ready to drop Bucky and charge into a fight he can’t possibly win, just as it’s all about to end, Bucky sees the Panther hold both hands up and to his side, palms out. It is the universal sign of “I mean you no harm.” And maybe, just maybe, it means this is when it’s all about to begin instead.