Chapter 1
Bucky had named all eleven goats before he remembered his mother's middle name, and he tried not to think too hard about what that said about him.
The smallest one was Dugan. She had a gray beard and no respect for property, and at the moment she was chewing on the hem of a shirt he'd hung on the line between the hut and the acacia tree. He let her. The shirt was a gift from Shuri, printed with a cartoon cat and a slogan he didn't understand, and he suspected it was a test of how much he was willing to put up with.
The lake below the hut lay flat as a sheet of tin. Mist was coming off the far hills in long strips, and somewhere out on the water a fisherman was singing, the sound arriving a beat late. Bucky had been awake since four. He was always awake by four. Some things the Wakandans could pull out of his head, and some things had grown roots.
He heard the jet before he saw it, a low thrum that the weaver birds noticed first. Then a Royal Talon Fighter slid over the ridge, banked once, and set down in the grass two hundred yards off, scattering a herd that wasn't his.
Bucky didn't get up. He'd learned that much, too. You didn't have to run toward everything.
The ramp lowered. A man came down it in a plain navy jacket, walking the way he had always walked, like the ground owed him an explanation. He had a beard now. It was a stupid beard. It suited him.
"Hey," Steve said, when he was close enough not to shout.
"You look like a lumberjack."
"You look like a goat farmer."
"I am a goat farmer." Bucky tipped his head at the pen. "Say hello to the Commandos."
Steve looked. Steve, being Steve, actually looked, moving from goat to goat with the grave attention he used to give the newspaper maps of France. Then his mouth did something complicated. "You named them after—"
"Dugan, Morita, Jones, Falsworth, Dernier." Bucky pointed with his chin. "Big one with the attitude is Phillips. The two at the water trough are Carter and Stark."
"Stark," Steve repeated.
"Howard. She keeps trying to get out and blow something up."
Steve laughed. It came out of him all at once, like it had been stuck somewhere for a long while, and he pressed the heel of his hand to his eyes. Bucky watched his shoulders shake and felt something in his chest shift half an inch to the left. It had always done that around Steve, even back when the chest in question belonged to a skinny kid hawking papers on the corner of Montague Street.
"That's ten," Steve said, when he'd recovered. "Who's the eleventh?"
Bucky looked at the lake. "Haven't decided."
That was a lie. He'd decided the day she was born, a white-faced runt with a stubborn jaw who'd shoved her own mother away from the feed bucket. He just hadn't said the name out loud yet. It felt like a thing you only said in front of a witness.
They sat on the bench he'd built from a fallen log. Steve had brought a paper bag of the small oranges they sold at the market in Birnin Zana, still green at the stem, and he peeled one in a single long ribbon, the way Sarah Rogers used to do at the kitchen table on Sundays.
"Where've you been?" Bucky asked.
"Around. Bucharest for a while, then Lagos again. Nat tracked a crew selling Chitauri scrap out of a rail yard outside Novi Grad."
"Sounds relaxing."
"Sam keeps calling it a vacation. I think he's being sarcastic."
"Wilson's always being sarcastic."
"He says you still owe him legroom."
"He can take it up with the goats."
Steve split the orange and held out half. Bucky took it with his right hand. His left sleeve was pinned up and empty; he'd mostly stopped noticing, except in moments like this, when he would have liked to hold the fruit and the bag at once. Steve noticed, and didn't say anything about it. He just set the bag on the bench between them, where it was easy to reach.
"T'Challa called me," Steve said after a while.
"Did he."
"Said Shuri's program was working. Said you'd started getting things back." He set each word down carefully, one at a time. "He said you asked for me."
Bucky had asked for him. Three nights ago he'd woken with the taste of coal smoke in his mouth and a whole evening lying complete in his head, like a room he'd walked into by accident and couldn't back out of. He'd gone to the lab at dawn. Shuri had studied the scans and then studied him, with an expression he'd learned meant she was trying not to be kind in a way that would embarrass him.
"You don't have to tell me," Steve said. "But you can."
Bucky turned a wedge of orange over in his fingers. The juice ran down his wrist.
"You remember your ma's funeral?"
Steve went very still. "Yeah."
"I walked you home after. Told you I'd stay. You told me to go to hell, more or less."
"I said I could get by on my own."
"Same thing, coming from you." Bucky ate the wedge. It was sour and very good. "I went home. Lay there an hour, staring at the ceiling. Then I got up and walked back. Your window was open. It was the middle of November and you had the damn window open because the radiator was busted and you'd rather freeze than ask the super for anything."
Steve didn't say anything. A goat bleated down at the pen, and another answered.
"You'd fallen asleep at the table. Your cheek was on a drawing of her, the one from the hospital, and there was charcoal all over your face. I climbed in off the fire escape and put my coat over you. And then I didn't leave." The lake had gone bright now, too bright to look at, so he looked at his hand instead. "I sat on the floor by that dead radiator and I listened to you breathe. Every time you breathed in there was a little catch, like you might not manage the next one. And I decided if you stopped, I was gonna be right there. That's all. I just decided it."
"Buck."
"Around four in the morning I reached out to—I don't know. Push your hair back off your face. It was in your eyes. And I stopped with my hand right there, about an inch off, and I thought, oh." He made himself say the rest of it, flat, the way you'd read out coordinates. "Oh. So that's what this is."
The fisherman had stopped singing. The only sound was the wind moving through the long grass and a goat working steadily at the acacia bark.
"That's what came back," Bucky said. "Not a mission. Not a name. That."
He waited for Steve to make it easy. Steve was good at making things easy for other people. It was the one subject on which he had never once been difficult. He'd say something about how they were kids, how it was a hard night, how grief made people strange. Bucky had the shape of it ready in his head so it wouldn't hurt when it arrived.
"I woke up with your coat on," Steve said instead.
Bucky looked at him.
"You were gone. The window was shut. Somebody had stuffed a dish towel in the gap so the draft wouldn't come in." Steve's voice had gone rough at the edges. "I thought I'd dreamed you. I wore that coat for a week. You never asked for it back."
"I had to borrow my old man's. It smelled like cigars."
"I know. You complained the whole week." Steve wasn't looking at the lake anymore. He was looking at Bucky, and his face was doing the thing it used to do right before he climbed onto a crate in an alley and told somebody twice his size exactly what he thought of them. "I kept that coat until 1941. It was in my footlocker when they shipped me out. I'm pretty sure it's in a warehouse in Jersey with the rest of my things."
"Steve."
"You stopped an inch off," Steve said. "I would've let you, you know. Then. Any time after. I just figured I was the only one who'd been thinking about it."
Bucky had spent seventy years being told what his hands were for. He had pulled triggers and snapped wrists and once, on a helicarrier over the Potomac, put his fist into a face he couldn't name while something in the back of his skull screamed. He had not, he realized, ever gotten to decide what this hand was for.
He reached out. Slowly, because he'd learned that, too.
Steve's hair was shorter than it had been in Brooklyn and longer than it had been in the war, and it was warm from the sun. Bucky pushed it back off his forehead, the whole inch, and then a little further, and let his palm rest there against Steve's temple. Steve closed his eyes. His breath went out of him in a long, unsteady line, and there was no catch in it at all.
"Took you long enough," Steve said, without opening his eyes.
"I was busy."
"Eighty years busy."
"Ask the goats. They'll tell you I've got a lot of responsibilities."
Something bumped against Bucky's knee. The white-faced runt had squeezed out under the fence again, the way she did every single morning, and was now trying to fit her whole head into the orange bag. Steve opened his eyes and watched her with the expression of a man meeting a relative.
"That's the eleventh," Bucky said.
"You said you hadn't decided."
"I lied. I was waiting for a witness."
Steve scratched the goat between her stubby horns. She butted him in the wrist, hard, then went right back to the bag as if he'd been put there for her convenience. "Well? What's her name?"
Bucky took his hand from Steve's hair, slowly, and laced his fingers through Steve's on the bench instead, where the morning light fell across them both.
"Punk," he said.
Steve laughed again, that same surprised laugh, and squeezed his hand so hard the knuckles creaked.
"Jerk," Steve said, and didn't let go.