Title: Wait for Me, and I'll Come Back

Author: Elspethdixon

Rating: PG

Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this fan-written work. We're paid in love, people.

A/N:Set post Avengers/Invaders, in some magical alternate continuity where Dark Reign & Siege didn't happen.

Wait for Me, and I'll Come Back

"Ann doesn't want to start things up again," Toro announced morosely. He wasn't looking at James, apparently finding the shiny black surface of his coffee more interesting than his one-time best friend's face. "She says she's moved on. That she's not the same woman I married anymore."

"It's been a long time, for her."

"No fucking kidding. There's also the fact that I'd make her look like a cradle robber, you know?" He snorted, and stirred another spoonful of sugar into his coffee.

Some things never changed, no matter how many years passed and how many lifetimes they went through, and an energy mutant's need for extra calories was one of them.

It ought to have been easy to pretend that this was years ago, that the two of them had met in this run-down diner after coming home safely from the war. The Formica countertop was straight out of the 1950s, as were the menu items, and the Johnny Cash music playing on the radio didn't do anything to lessen the timeless effect. Only the plastic laminated, laser-printed menu was out of place.

And James's steel fingers curled oh-so-carefully around the white Styrofoam of his coffee cup.

"It's only been a couple of weeks," James offered. "It will get easier."

"Bucky," Toro said flatly, pinning him with the same "Christ, how stupid are you?" look he'd once reserved for James's more creative tactical suggestions, "I look like I'm twelve. No one will serve me a drink. No one will sell me cigarettes without asking for ID, and then they don't believemy ID, not that that matters, because the bars that won't serve me also won't let you smoke anymore."

"And the subway costs two dollars, and the Dodgers are gone, and all the actresses in the pictures are boney women with skinny legs. You and Steve should hang out together sometime."

Toro raised his eyebrows. "Come on, you can't tell me it doesn't bug you sometimes, how different everything is."

"It's not the differences that bother me." Not the differences in New York, anyway, or the vast array of modern technology, much of which he was still learning to use - the NKVD hadn't bothered to keep the Winter Soldier caught up on current technological advances unless they directly affected his ability to carry out a mission.

The differences in people, though. That was something else. The differences in himself...

Toro had lived an entire life before he'd died and been resurrected. James had barely lived half of one - he wasn't even sure how old he was, in a purely physical sense. Somewhere between mid-twenties and mid-thirties. Every time he thought he'd pinned down an approximate estimate, he'd note another discrepancy - the relative absence of wrinkles around his eyes or the amount of time it would have taken for the number of broken bones he didn't remember acquiring to heal - and he would have to revise his estimate again.

"What bothers you, then?"

James hesitated, but the part of him that remembered being Bucky, remembered lying awake next to Toro in the middle of the night, nothing but a military-issue blanket between the two of them and the frozen French dirt, talking about what they were going to do 'after the war' and admitting, very quietly and only under the cover of darkness, how scared they were, was still strong enough that he found himself answering, and answering truthfully.

"I don't know who I am anymore," he said, slowly. Speaking was easier if he didn't look at Toro, and so he didn't, staring down instead at his fingers interlaced around the coffee cup, flesh and steel in an alternating pattern of stripes. The coffee had been steeped for too long - it smelled stale and bitter, and it tasted that way, too, underneath the sugar he'd dumped into it. "I spent so long as a weapon, just something to be taken out of its case when they needed it and put away afterwards, and then I got my memories back, and Steve died, and I spent so much time trying to wear his uniform, trying to carry on his legacy, and now I have him back, but... I don't know if I have me anymore. At least when I was carrying the shield I was someone, even if it was only a copy of him."

"It wasn't that different, you know," Toro's voice was low, soft with memories that made him sound much older than the barely-legal teenager he looked like. "When we came back from the war, when the fighting ended. I'd never had a normal life or a steady, regular job like most people have, never lived in the same place for more than a few weeks at a time. I kept half my clothes packed away in a suitcase for years, just in case. It used to drive Ann nuts."

"How long did it take?" His voice sounded uncertain, hollow, like it belonged to someone else. "Until you stopped feeling like a sham?"

"Pretty much never. Welcome to adulthood, kid." Toro clapped him on the shoulder, and James tried to imagine that he could feel the slightly-higher-than-normal heat of Toro's hand radiating through his leather jacket, the way he'd once been able to feel it through his uniform.

People didn't touch his left arm, except for Steve, who tried to pretend he hadn't changed, and Natasha, who had never known him without it and though of it as just one more part of him. And Stark, but Stark's interest in his cyborg bits was frankly creepy, and James preferred not to think too hard about it.

"I just... I don't know what to do," he admitted. "I want things to go back to the way they were. But Steve's got a new life for himself now, one that I'm not really a part of, and everyone I've been working with for the past six months - they're really his friends, his girl, his partner. I just borrowed them for a while, and then I had to give them back."

Toro snorted. "Enough already, okay? I had to claw my way out of my own grave. You officially are not allowed to complain about anything in my presence."

James winced. Guilt was Stark's thing, and something he preferred not to dwell on, but that... "Yeah. Um, sorry about that? I really didn't know that would happen."

Toro waved a hand, dismissing it, and James made himself look at the almost-healed scabs on his fingertips, the split fingernails. "Namor's putting a new Invaders team together, to go after that Dr. Doom guy and hunt down Norman Osborn. He wants me to join him."

"Are you going to?"

Toro shook his head. The light slanting through the diner's cloudy windows silhouetted him from behind, and though it wasn't really like a corona of flame, the golden glow still seemed fitting, somehow. Toro belonged in the light, not down in the cold earth, dead and forgotten. "Hell, I don't know. I don't even know who half these people are, or why we're fighting them."

"Fury wants me to help him and Natasha take down HYDRA. It would be deep cover, secret, like the kind of thing I did for the Soviets. Not the kind of thing Steve would approve of."

"You're not Cap." Toro drained his coffee cup and set it down again. There were finger-shaped indentations melted into the side of the cup, from where he had re-heated it. James had always been jealous of that trick.

"No," he said, and oddly, despite months of trying his damndest to be Cap, to live up to him, admitting it didn't hurt as much as he'd thought it would. "I'm not."

"And I'm not the Flaming Kid anymore, and there's already another Human Torch." Toro signaled the waitress for another coffee, seeming to suddenly shed the air of melancholy like a tree shrugging off a coating of winter ice. "I gotta find something to call myself, if I'm getting back into the game."

James smiled in spite of himself. "You still going to wear a speedo for a costume?"

Toro actually laughed, a faint, half-choked off sound that James didn't realize he'd missed so deeply until he heard it. "I'm thinking clothing this time. Some kind of union-suit thing, like the Fantastic Four have. I'll have a hard enough time getting people to take me seriously as it is, looking this young."

"Too bad." He smirked at Toro, remembering the tiny scrap of cloth that he'd spent so many hours staring hungrily at. "I kind of liked the speedo."

"I kind of like the black leather." The grin Toro flashed at him then warmed him in a way that the coffee hadn't, and James felt something like relief to know that not everything had changed.

"I looked pretty good in the blue and red leather."

"No you didn't," Toro snorted. "I've seen pictures." He reached over and laid his right hand atop James's left. "I like the robot arm, too. It's... familiar. Reminds me of Jim." The grin have offered James turned subtly warmer, and James was immersed in Bucky's memories again, of too-warm hands and hair that always smelled like smoke, and the things other than talking that they had done together in the dark. "Part of you's always going to be flameproof now."

"Huh." James lifted his cybernetic hand and stared at it for a moment. "That's one way of looking at it, I guess."

Toro picked up his refilled coffee cup and tapped it lightly against the edge of James's. "To starting over. Again."

"Wait for us," James quoted, "and we'll come back. Dodging every fate." He drained the rest of his cold, sweet/bitter coffee, and crumpled the cup in his hand.

"That sounds about right." Toro drained his own cup, unbothered by the steam still curling out of it, and set it down on the cracked Formica counter. "The Invaders are like the proverbial bad pennies. Nothing can get rid of us."

He sounded slightly rueful as he said it, but James laughed anyway, letting himself pretend that it was true.

End

The title and Bucky's toast come from a poem by Konstantin Simonov (http: / / www. simonov. co. uk/ waitforme. htm)