It was an easy choice, as easy as breathing, to marry John Egan when the war ended. Those months you’d spent wandering Thorpe Abbotts like a ghost, trying your best to be normal while Bucky was a prisoner of war - it made you realise you never wanted to live without him again. So when he defied death and returned to you, he’d proposed.

The Bucky you knew before his imprisonment was different to the Bucky he returned as, but you loved him just the same. Things weren’t easy, adjusting to civilian life again while adjusting to married life, the sky now being a distant thing rather than something he was powering through every day, but you both put in the work.

When you wake up to an empty bed, you know where he’ll be. You plod to the kitchen, and peek your head out the open porch door. His nightmares came often, and he never wanted to wake you so instead he’d come out here, listen to the sounds of the water and the birds chirping. He sits in a rocking chair, one he’d made himself, his long legs splayed out in front of him, with his eyes on the view from your backyard.