I get that a lot, actually. ❰ though he probably seemed more spry when he still had the body the serum gave him, really. steve — doesn't want to talk about this. he really, really doesn't want to talk about this, especially not with a bucky who'll almost definitely yell at him for it. he's imagined the lecture he'd get from bucky if he knew about the valkyrie hundreds of times over the two years since he came out of the ice, even dreamt about it. it was always more comforting than he thinks it's probably going to be in reality. ❱

A few weeks after you fell, we stormed Schmidt's stronghold. ❰ the words come out with hardly any inflection, as if by rote. like steve's had to explain this before, and is tired of the story now. ❱ He and I ended up on a plane headed for the east coast. I beat him, but the plane's controls were damaged in our fight. It was loaded up with bombs that used the same tech as the Hydra guns — I couldn't let them hit the states. So I put the plane down.

Sixty seven years later, I woke up in a SHIELD office in Manhattan. Turns out I froze in the Arctic, but I didn't die. They thawed me out, pulled me back into the world. It's been two years since then. So.

❰ steve shrugs again, looking down at their feet. at least bucky has both his arms, he thinks, distantly. whatever magic pulled them both here like this managed to get to him before that. ❱

Two years, or sixty nine. Depends on if you go by my clock or the rest of the world's.