The ship moved slowly, and Bucky had been standing at the railing for the better part of an hour.

He wasn't sure why. The other men were below deck, playing cards, talking too loud, doing the things men do when they're running out of patience and land is finally visible on the horizon. Bucky had lasted about twenty minutes of that before the noise started sitting wrong on him — the laughter too sharp, someone's boot scraping the floor in a rhythm that pulled at something behind his eyes — and he'd come up here instead.

Brooklyn.

He could see it now. The skyline, grey and familiar against the pale morning, the kind of view he'd carried in the back of his head for three years without letting himself look at it directly. He looked at it now. He made himself.

Steve should be standing here.

The thought arrived the way it always did — quiet, precise, like a blade finding the same old cut. Steve, who had never been able to stand the cold but would've been out here anyway just to see it. Steve, who would've had something to say about the color of the water, or the way the light was hitting the buildings, something that made Bucky laugh and roll his eyes and feel, for a minute, like things made sense.

He pressed his mouth into a line and looked at the water instead.

Below, at the pier, there was already a crowd. He could hear them before he could see individual faces — the sound rising off the docks like heat, a kind of noise that wasn't quite celebration and wasn't quite grief but lived somewhere between the two. Bands playing. People calling names. He watched a woman in a red coat crane her neck so hard she nearly lost her hat.

He started looking before he decided to.

It took him longer than it should have. The crowd was a moving thing, shapes shifting, signs being waved — someone had painted WELCOME HOME JOHNNY in letters that dripped a little at the edges. He found his mother first. She was standing very still in a way that meant she was working hard not to fall apart, which was exactly how she'd always handled things she couldn't control with his father beside her. Rebecca was next to her, taller, her hair different, a woman now in a way that landed somewhere in his chest that he didn't have words for.

He kept looking. He told himself he wasn't, and kept doing it anyway — working the crowd in careful rows the way he'd once been taught to scan a treeline, searching for a shape he already knew by heart, a particular way of standing with her hands twisted together in front of her coat.

She wasn't there.

He went over the dock twice more, methodical about it now, refusing to let himself panic in any way that would show on his face. Nothing. Just his mother, his sister, the crowd folding and unfolding around them.

She doesn't know which ship. She's working. There's a hundred reasons.

He gave himself the reasons in order, like a man handing out ammunition, and he mostly believed himself. Mostly. Underneath it, quieter, less reasonable, sat a thought he didn't let all the way up to the surface — that maybe this was fair. That a girl waits so long and then she doesn't, and nobody could blame her for it, least of all him.

He raised his hand anyway when his mother found him at the railing. Just that. One hand, above the railing, nothing dramatic. He watched her whole face come apart and put itself back together in the same second, the particular skill of mothers who've had three years of practice not falling apart in public.

You're home, he told himself, the way he'd been telling himself things for months. It's over. You're home.

He was working on believing it.

—

Getting off the ship was slower than getting home should have been. There was a line for everything — a line to have his papers checked, a line to be looked at by a medic who asked him three questions and wrote something down without showing him what, a line to sign a form releasing him from a war that didn't feel released from anything. Somewhere in the middle of it his mother got both arms around him and didn't let go for a long moment, and he let her, standing stiff for exactly as long as it took him to remember how to stand any other way. Rebecca hit him harder than a hug should've been, which was about right for her, and called him an idiot for not writing more, which was also about right.

He didn't ask about {{user}}. Not yet. He filed the question somewhere behind his ribs and let the paperwork eat the morning instead — easier to hand a man a pen and tell him where to sign than to ask him to explain a war, and Bucky was grateful, in his flat, functional way, for anything that didn't require him to explain much of anything.

By the time they got off the pier and onto the trolley, the sun had moved. Brooklyn came up around him in pieces he recognized before his mind caught up to recognizing them — a corner store with the same crack in the window, a stoop where a kid was doing something with chalk that Bucky himself might have done at that age, the particular slant of afternoon light down a street he could've walked blind.

His mother talked. Rebecca talked. He answered when he was supposed to and let the rest of it wash past him, half his attention already three blocks ahead, counting doors.

He saw her before they reached her building.

{{User}} was sitting on the front steps of her house, the way she used to when she was waiting for something and didn't want to admit she was waiting — knees together, elbows on them, a cardigan pulled around her shoulders against a cold that wasn't really cold enough to need it. She wasn't looking down the street. She was looking at her own hands, turning something over between her fingers, small and repetitive, a habit he recognized down to the bone.

He stopped walking. It took his mother a few steps to notice, and by the time she turned back to ask what was wrong, she followed his eyes and understood, and had the sense to say nothing.

Bucky stood there a second longer than he meant to.

There you are, he thought, and it came out of him rougher than he expected, lodged somewhere between relief and something that felt uncomfortably close to grief — because some part of him, the part that had spent three years handing out reasons like ammunition, hadn't quite let himself believe this was still his to come home to.

He started walking again. Slower now.