#hashtag fml

thinking about the innocence of that one sweet syllable leaving his lips in kreischberg, when he’s strapped to a table and barely keeping his grasp on reality, and how he smiles when he says it,

“steve”,

tender on his breath, and how he sighs it again while steve gathers him up into his arms, like it’s a balm, like it’s all the solace he needed, like this is all it took to make his pain go away for a blissful moment.

thinking about how cautiously he keeps his distance from steve in his apartment in bucharest; how he tries to protect himself, protect them both, by acting like he doesn’t remember – and still he slips up and says,

“you’re steve,” soft and a little hoarse and all too intimate, like it was only yesterday that he last called steve’s name out loud. and then he tries to fix that by attaching “i read about you in a museum” at the end, but it’s too late, his heart has already spoken before his mouth could stop it, the cat’s out of the bag now and there’s no shoving it back in.

thinking about how he wakes up later, finally in charge of his own body again, sore and exhausted and confused, and steve’s name is the first word on his lips, again, always,

and it’s so raw and vulnerable and it sounds so much like “i’m sorry”, sorry i lied to you, sorry i’ve been away for so long, sorry i’m still a weapon they can use against you, and it sounds a little bit like surrender too, like he’s done denying how he feels, and you can see the relief in his smile when he finally admits that of course, of course he knows steve, he’s in the marrow of bucky’s bones, a hundred years of torture couldn’t sap him out of bucky’s system – and bucky knows that because they’ve tried, they’ve already tried and it didn’t stick.

how many times do you think he curled up in a corner of his cell, back when hydra was first breaking him, and whispered steve’s name over and over in the ice-cold silence, reaching for any feeble memory of steve’s face, his voice, before it slipped between his fingers again?

I'll never be able to tell him I'm a boy and I have to live by my deadname with family and I'll forever be scared of my parents and friends meeting and I'll never be able to have my friends meet my parents without knowing I'm trans and .

but i cant even hate him because i do love him and i know he loves me too its just.

fuck . if i legally change my name he can't know and i need to walk the stage to my deadname and get my deadname on my thespian polo and I hate myself so much for being like this sometimes