Summary: It was a mutual separation if there was such a thing. They were going to different colleges across the country and neither of them wanted to do long-distance. Besides, they knew the statistic: only 2% of high school relationships lasted, and while they did last longer than the national average, the odds were against them.
Or, after nearly two decades, Bucky finds Steve again in the small town of Portland, Maine and they spend the week together.
Specs: Millimeter binding, square back bradel, green edges with gold sprinkling, white endbands, gold endpapers, 63 pages, A6. With an accompanying unpublished alternate fic as bonus content.
A favorite of mine from @bonky-bornes that lands exactly where it should and digs into all the softest crevices of your heart. Melancholic and full of heartache, reading this felt like a painful, refreshing bout of rain.
On the process: It was so much fun trying to typeset something stripped back yet still elegant to match the tone of this story, and I really ended up liking the clean look of this. The snippet of the summary on the back was a last minute choice that I ended up adoring.
I wanted a nature-inspired, rainy feel and look, so in addition to the umbrella and images, I decided to do gold sprinkled edges over green to emulate raindrops and add a bit of sparkle. Overall, I think this is pretty close to what I had in mind!
my personal little headcanons about that time between civil war and infinity war:
when bucky is in cryo, and steve is off fighting hydra, shuri, unprompted, gives him tech that lets him see bucky’s vitals always. he checks it religiously.
sam and nat exchange a lot of looks about it, but never say anything
wanda teaches steve how to braid via nat’s hair
she also cuts nat’s hair for her with drug store scissors in an old polish motel
they all bleach her hair the same night with sketchy drug store bleach. it takes them all night. the bleach gets everywhere. they have to pay to replace the carpet.
sam tells a lot of bad dad jokes. nat hits him over the back of his head a lot.
(they’re in love)
when wanda goes on her getaways to meet vision, they all know. they don’t say so.
they have a lot of aliases. mostly, they use random internet name generators. sometimes, sam and nat try to see if they can get away with giving steve pop culture names he won’t recognize (they don’t get away with emmett brown, but they do get away with michael scott)
when bucky’s vitals show that he’s waking up, steve is immediately on his way to wakanda, they let him go without question.
they never comment when he’s gone for weeks at a time and feel bad for having to call him back in.
they all have nightmares. they make each other tea and stay up together. they never make each other talk about it.
but sometimes they do talk about it, because they know the other would understand, and they trust each other.
on one occasion, sam, nat, and wanda go back to wakanda with steve and spend a weekend there. bucky has named goats after all of them.
they watch a lot of foreign language soap operas
when steve isn’t with bucky, he calls him most nights. they talk until 4am.
sometimes sam and nat wake up curled around each other. they don’t talk about it.
wanda, as the youngest by far, is not coddled, but protected. they want to keep her safe and feel bad for making her grow up under such shitty cirumstances. she rolls their eyes and tells them to stop treating her like a baby. (she loves steve’s big hugs)
steve sings in the shower, and nat records it for blackmail. he’s a bad singer.
wanda takes little souvernirs from the places they go.
sam writes vague postcards to his sister under an alias.
they play a lot of uno
they’re family.
i had two glasses of wine and am so in love with this bunch. i didn’t read this over, so i hope it makes sense.
