If Marie had known what Steve was thinking, she'd have insisted that he was doing the right thing, that his mother would surely have understood and thanked him for making that terribly difficult decision. What she had now wasn't life, it was prolonged dying and no one deserved that sort of suffering.

But she didn't know anything of what he was thinking, or Bucky, but she still sprang into action when Steve suddenly broke down in tears. "Come on, sugar, let's sit you down," she murmured to him, looking over at Bucky and catching his eye before nodding toward a bench just a few feet down the way. If they got him seated so he could really let it out, then she'd wrap him up in her arms for as long as he needed and hold him as tightly as she could without hurting him.