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Summary
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” Peggy says, “These are the times that try men’s souls.”
Series
- Part 3 of Not Easily Conquered
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Bookmark Notes:
fuck me gently with a god damn chainsaw
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Bookmark Notes:
Haunting and brutal and still oh, so very hopeful. Steve, Peggy, Bucky, and Natasha post CA2.
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Bookmark Notes:
“And you know, it’s funny: for the longest time I felt like I was looking for something. I think,” Steve says, “That I was looking for the truth. But I couldn’t find it anywhere, and that didn’t make sense. I even dug down deep inside myself, but there was nothing in there, either. I turned into the Tin Man without you: knock on my chest, you heard it echo for miles. So I looked and looked, but no matter where I did, I kept turning up you, finding you, over and over again, each decade of this life. But I think I get it now — I think I finally understand. I don’t know how it took me so long. It’s because you’re the truth, Buck. You’re the truest thing I’ve ever known.”
“Is that so?” Bucky asks, after a long, long pause.
Steve shrugs — what can you do? — and says, “All this time, I never thought I’d —“ and now he’s gasping, shocked by it, his throat closing up. He says, “Oh, Christ. You know, Buck, I never thought I’d get the chance to.”
Bucky turns the chair closest to Steve and sits before him. Their knees wedge together and after a moment Bucky reaches out his hand to on the back of Steve’s neck, warm, heavy. For the first time in his entire life Steve reaches up his hand and presses him thumb into the little dimple in Bucky’s chin.
“I never felt you leave,” he confesses in a whisper, and all of a sudden his vision blurs. “I never felt you die, Buck. You were always there. You were always there. I thought I had lost my mind. I couldn’t shake you. I never shook you. I felt you out there in the world: some part of me. So I spent my whole life looking back. I spent my whole life hoping I’d see you in my rearview. Just a glimpse. Anything. I waited. I’ve been waiting.”
Bucky kisses him, very softly, very quietly, and simple: simple as though it hasn’t been a hundred years in the making. “Sorry,” he mumbles into Steve’s mouth, even as he does it. “M’sorry, I shouldn’t.”
“Shouldn’t —oh,” Steve realizes, and it makes him laugh; after all this, what a ridiculous thing to say. “Oh, no, Buck.”
“Got yourself a family.”
“And now I got you.”
“You can’t act like it’s so simple.”
“Watch me” Steve says, and Bucky gives a laugh that’s wet and bloody as a newborn. “I was so quiet for so long,” Steve tells him, and it hurts again so badly he can’t breathe from it. With Bucky it comes and goes: this tightness in his throat, like pain from a sickness. All he can do is hold on and weather it through. “You never knew. I know you thought I didn’t. It hurt you.”
“Yeah it hurt me,” Bucky says, and kisses him viciously, and bites; but Steve bends for him, and lets him take whatever he wants. He owes it; he likes it. “Yeah it hurt me,” Bucky repeats, though now he kisses him in a way that says he isn’t so angry anymore.
*
This story has been unbelievable and strange, but maybe this is the most unbelievable and strange part of all: I never forgot him, not really. I only told myself that I had. I forgot without forgetting at all.
For decades I hid him deep within a secret part of me, and even though I lost his specifics, his nose, his brow, I somehow knew that he lived safe and far away, and that knowledge alone was my comfort. The shape he took in my mind was something special, and beyond that he was stored in incremental pieces all throughout me anyway: my teeth missed him, and so did my kneecaps, and even my angry hands. My spine knew something was wrong, too — I swear to God it felt the absent rungs. But my memory is four-dimensional and just enough elastic, which is maybe why it worked so well: why I could forget without forgetting, and why it all filtered back so quickly. Now I can tell anyone all about him; I can conjure him up straight from memory. And what a luxury it is, too — what a rich man I am — that I can think of him at all, the blue eyes, the chin, that red little mouth. If I kiss him anywhere he turns bruised and overripe and wanting, alive in my hands: and wouldn’t you like to know. His mean wit will cut you in two. But why would I tell you, of all people? Why would I tell you, when I’ve already spread myself at your feet, butterflied? Don’t read what comes next, I dare you. It’s only for him.
Today I can see all the way to the truth I’ll know at the end of the world.
Listen close. Listen to me when I say it in your ear. Remember it for me, just in case I ever happen to forget it again. I know this one in my spine-bones and somewhere now in the meat of my heart. It’s why the grave couldn’t keep me in, sweetheart. It’s how you even found me again at all. The fact of us is simple arithmetic. Torch me, bury me, break me: it's never going to stick. I’ll always come back from the dead for you. We belonged to each other before we ever belonged to ourselves.