Title: Peanuts Park
Fandom: MCU
Rating: PG
Length: 1400 words
Content notes: post-Winter Soldier, pre-Ant Man clip
Author notes: This is not a strong fandom for me to write in and ages since I've written fic at all--be gentle!! According to my NYC native, Bryant Park was known as 'peanuts park' when she was a little girl, because of the, well, Steve explains it.
Summary: Where else do you go when you don't remember who you are?


It didn’t take a brain like Tony Stark’s to figure out where Bucky would go--New York City, where they’d grown up, where years and years of memories lay, deep and rich like a hope chest.

Where does a man go when he has no idea who he is? To a place where he used to be someone.

Steve knew that all too well. He’d tried it himself, so he also knew how well that wouldn’t go. Which was why he’d simply told Agent Hill that it was important, and left. It’s not like he was hard to find.

After that, it was just a matter of walking around their old stomping grounds, streets his feet knew better than his eyes, playing what had quickly become a not-fun game of remembering what shops used to be in what places, as he looked for the man who was out of place.

A man, for example, wearing a hoodie and gloves. In July. Sitting on the park bench, gloved hands knotting together, shins tucked under the seat, with only the toes resting on the ground. Tense, in a place where everyone else was lounging, sprawling and loose, baking in the heat.

Steve crossed over, sitting down casually at the other end of the bench. He could feel the tension almost vibrate through the wood and steel of the bench: Bucky’s muscles coiling, taut-strung, knowing that if he ran, he’d get even more attention, stand out even more in this place he was trying to disappear into.

“Peanuts Park, remember?” Steve said, keeping his eyes carefully ahead. “We used to come here when the circus came and feed the elephants.” Everything from that time seemed gold-limned--Steve’s mother and the threadbare coat his father had bought her from Klein’s department store as a farewell gift, pushing him forward toward the probing, curious trunks. He could remember the bristles surprised him, on the trunks, and how deftly the elephants would pick up the nuts from his outstretched palm. So much power and strength, and so gentle.

Nothing--no sound or movement--next to him, but Bucky was still there, after all, still listening.

A sign of something, at any rate. Steve continued. “Everything looks off, you know? It still gets to me sometimes. The music is so fast, and the food….” He laughed. “Apparently it’s ‘tacos’ and not ‘tay-koes’.” Natasha still hadn’t let him live that one down. And he was willing to bet--and it hurt to think about--that Bucky probably hadn’t had many tacos while HYDRA had him. His heart ached to think of all Bucky had done without.

“Hats.” The word was so soft that for a moment Steve wasn’t sure he’d heard it. But then, “Nobody wears hats anymore.”

And in July, it was true enough, except for a few baseball caps and one or two committed hipsters, their porkpies and fedoras just a little too small, too high on the head. Steve risked a glance over--the tangle of Bucky’s hair, lank, dark, peeking from under the sunbleached black hood, the heavy gloves.

“Aren’t you hot in that?” The direct question was a risk, but he had a feeling Bucky wouldn’t run by now. He could almost feel the need the other man had to share something, to be heard, acknowledged. Maybe, to take a fumbling step towards himself, toward who he was now.

A pause, hands squirming on his legs. “Feels good. To be warm. After--” the words stuttered and died, but Steve could guess the rest.

He nodded, knowing Bucky could catch the movement from his periphery. “Before I woke up, I had, yeah. Nightmares.” He still wasn’t ready to talk about it himself--a cold so intense it burned, a dark so deep it blinded him. Even in the heat, he shivered at the memory. “Not a fan of the cold, either.” He’d woken up in a cozy, warm, and entirely fake room, but the icewater cold had entered deeper than his veins and bones, somewhere deep in his mind. Cold felt like fear.

“I don’t think I can be him anymore,” Bucky said, the words almost tumbling over themselves to get out of his mouth. “Who I was, here, I mean.” All the loss in the world in his voice even as he was trying, even as he was reaching out, however tentatively, for connection.

“I can’t, either,” Steve said. Not that he really wanted to be--alone, lonely, thin and sick, burning to do good, helpless to do anything. But Bucky? Back then he’d been cocky, self-assured, hats always worn at a rakish tilt, wry, confident smile flitting easily over his mouth, hair smooth and clean cut. “He’s still part of who I am, though.” You, too, he added, mentally. The kid I knew, on the track team, in debate club. The star athlete who always had time to walk home from school with the weakling. The man I knew in the 107th. My friend. My friend. He knew that Bucky was still in him.

“So’s the...other one.” Bucky’s left hand flexed, the uncanny smoothness of cybernetics making the motion almost too smooth. And the hood turned toward Steve, Bucky’s brown eyes shadowed darker than the hood. “I did bad things, Steve. I let them make me do them.”

“You didn’t ‘let’ them do anything,” Steve said, hotly. “I know you fought it. I SAW you fighting it.” And he’d seen how much it hurt, like a drowning man trying to pull himself out of a riptide. And he still remembered the crunch of that metal fist against his jaw--a man lashing out, afraid of himself, afraid of what he was discovering himself to be.

“Everything’s changed,” Bucky said, after a long pause. “You don’t need me anymore, and I--I mean--my body isn’t even my own.” The left hand jumped into a fist.

It was Steve’s turn to fall quiet for a long moment. What would it be like to have part of your body replaced, alien and strange? Zola’s fingerprints were all over that and...all the other things they’d done to Bucky that weren’t so visible. What was it like to have so much of you smudged by evil hands?

But the first: “I always need my friend,” he said, finally. Bucky had been his protector in school--a big brother, the friend who’d taken his hand, unselfconscious, at Sarah Rogers’s funeral. Now it was Steve's turn to reach out a hand, laying it over Bucky’s right hand. The palm turned under his, hot and human, and the hooded head bent down. Bucky’s hand squeezed his, the way soldiers do in the medic’s station before they get morphine, a human gesture of sharing pain.

“Know what else I need?” Steve said, the light words struggling over the lump in his throat. He paused, mastering himself, gathering himself. “Katz’s Deli still makes the best pastrami on rye in town.” An offer, of something like normalcy, something good they could both share. It was almost ironic how much they had in common in other ways--displaced from time, bodies altered by science, and the long scars of war. It would be nice to share something good, something from that time when everything, well, wasn’t any easier, but at least the way forward seemed clear and bright and good.

A little resistance as he freed his hand, shifting his weight to the front of the bench. Steve felt the hope waver. “I can’t,” Bucky said, quietly. Maybe he thought it was a trap.

“You can,” Steve said. “It’s a sandwich. And maybe talking. That’s all. I give my word.” He felt a little--but only a little--embarrassment at the note of pleading in his voice. Let Bucky hear how much he cared, let him hear how important he still/always was to Steve.

Bucky sucked in a deep breath, and let it go in a long, almost shivering sigh, the hooded head nodding, yielding. Steve felt his heart lighten again, rising to his feet, knowing Bucky was moving to stand next to him. “I think,” he said, wanting to take Bucky’s hand again, but not wanting to crowd him, push him before he was ready, “I bet,” he corrected, “we can get ‘em to make a proper egg cream, too.”

“A Coney dog,” Bucky said, behind him. “Can’t even think how long it’s been since I had a good Coney.”

Too long: Years. Decades. Steve’s time was simply lost: Bucky’s had been stolen from him by HYDRA. “You know what?” Steve said. “I can’t either. And I know just the place.”