our love is a monster

Fault Lines by @uro-boros and @princess-of-the-worlds for the Captain America Reverse Bang 2019 (@capreversebb)

“What happened?”

And what had happened was what happened to all stories at some point. They ended. The Barnes’ moved to Indiana, to live with aunts and uncles who would and could care for the ailing George and his two children and his grieving wife. Steve and Bucky called and wrote letters but they dwindled and waned with time and lives growing apart. Bucky’s last letter hailed from a boot camp in Wisconsin, just after his nineteenth birthday. He was shipping out. Then, Sarah got sick. Then, Sarah died.

Then, Steve signed a waiver and an NDA and all but disappeared from the world. When he came back, all of his broken bits were miraculously fixed.

“Steve,” she says, standing there with her dark glossy hair in victory rolls, her blue peacoat ironed, her collar starched — how different she is, than the girl he used to draw in his sketchbook, gap-toothed and grasping little lizards. “Mama says you should come over.” There isn’t a single tremble in her voice.

How brave she is, Steve thinks, and sees like a mirage the girl she once was transposed over her. How brave she’s always been.

He grabs his coat and his hat, and tucks her pale hand into the crook of his elbow. The least he can do is be a sliver as brave as her — a borrowed inch.

He’s been expecting this.

—

This is how it goes: in August, 1943, Steve receives a letter.

/Dear Steve,/ it says, in Bucky’s loping cursive. Without lines to follow, his words come at a slant. /Italy is beautiful, but you’d like it better. This is what the old masters saw, or something like that./

/Mostly, I am tired,/ says Bucky, composing his letter from his fox hole or his pup tent — Steve imagines it as a pup tent, because that would be better. /Mostly, I am tired, and the war is boring until it isn’t. And when it isn’t, it is terrible, but I am not allowed to say that to anyone except for you, Steve, in these letters, because I am a sergeant and I am responsible for the men’s morale, and also because mama would cry if she heard me say it, and so would Becca. So I have to tell you, Steve, because you, like you so often are, are the only one I can tell the truth of things to./

/I miss Brooklyn,/ says Bucky, /I miss how awful it smells in summer, and how cold it is in winter. I miss sitting at mama’s table and playing cards with my cousins and with you, even though you always count the cards and cheat. Italy would be beautiful but the war has made it ugly, like it has made all of us ugly. I wish you were here to paint it, if only so I could see it the way it’s meant to be seen./

/Except I don’t wish you were here at all, and each day, I grow gladder that you are home and safe, that you can still sit at mama’s table and cheat my cousins, that you can take Becca to the dance hall (or that she can take you, rather). I am glad you do not have to see this, only that I wish I did not have to see it either. I know you will hate to hear this, but I am glad you are not here./

There’s no formal end to Bucky’s thoughts.

This is a pattern.

—

Winifred Barnes has gray in her hair. It wasn’t there a year and half ago, when Bucky shipped out. It’s been growing steadily since then, in steely strands from her temples. Bucky wasn’t her oldest son — Bucky had told seven-year old Steve that once, but his older brother had gone unnamed into a family plot at a week old. Bucky was the one who had survived; little James, who never fussed as a baby but had regarded the world around him with calm and curious eyes.

She’s clutching a tea towel and a telegram in front of the sink when Steve is escorted into the kitchen and sat at the table by Becca. She turns to him, and he sees it on her face, and it shouldn’t be a shock, it shouldn’t. Steve has known since August, when Bucky’s last letter came in. He had felt it then, a cold pit in his heart, an unfathomable expanse of loss. But still.

Still, it’s different, to hear it in the Barnes household, surrounded by Bucky’s family.

Winifred touches her temple, where the gray hair is. She looks at him, and her eyes are Bucky’s eyes. “It doesn’t mean anything,” she says, waving the telegram. “It doesn’t say anything, it doesn’t say that he’s,” her breath catches in a hitch before she exhales sharply. “I deeply regret to inform you that your son, James Barnes 32557038, is missing in action.

And so this is it: the crux. Every illness that seizes Steve’s lungs is like a cold chill down Bucky’s spine. It’s the thought of his nightmares, the ones that jolt him awake in the middle of the night. It’s the thought that sends him running, always, to church and to his knees, to pray that God’ll see him through this one, like he saw Steve through the last. And maybe it’s selfish that Bucky does — that Bucky keeps praying and God keeps giving, because it confines Steve to his too small body, with all its aches and pains, with its crooked spine and its weak heart. But Bucky can’t stop it, either. And he hates Flannigan, in that moment, for the reminder of Steve’s weak lungs and his poor heart and Bucky’s all consuming terror.

Flannigan’s mouth moves faster than his brain, which is a shame for him, really, because Bucky’s fist moves faster than both. He pops Flanngan once in the mouth, smartly, and Flannigan reels, wiping the back of his hand bloody against his face in shock.

“Whadya’do that for?” he cries. The gum he was chewing falls from his open mouth, pink streaked red with blood now. “I was just saying —“

“You think real good about what you’re saying next time,” Bucky tells him. It sounds dangerous to his ears. It sounds dangerous to everyone’s ears, because all the boys eye him like something’s gone off about him, and Flannigan takes a step back. And it’s lucky for them that Steve comes down the hall at that moment. That Steve is healthy today; that God’s kept his end of the bargain with Bucky. That swirling, angry mess in the pit of his stomach goes away at the sight of Steve loping down the hall with his too big feet and his chin still scabbed and healing from his last fight.

“There’s something wrong about you,” says Teddy Flannigan, catching onto the line of Bucky’s eyes. “There’s something wrong with you, Barnes.”

He doesn’t have anything to say to that. That’s something Bucky’s known.

—

This isn’t the story that gets told in the history books.

In those, James Barnes becomes a sad footnote in the history of Steve Rogers. Later, if there’s a story told about him at all, it’s a ghost story.

Maybe it always was.

—

It’s summer, and Brooklyn is sticky with heat. Bucky likes summer, because Steve might complain about it, but he’s usually healthy all through it, and because the sun makes them both strip down to their undershirts and their shorts, because Steve burns in the high afternoon suns when they play stickball with the other boys on the block (and Becca, who insists she’s better than them all), and Bucky gets to peel the skin from his back when it turns white and filmy.

He knows he shouldn’t like that; but it reminds him of a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, the redness of Steve’s slanted shoulders giving way to perfect Irish cream. It gives Bucky an excuse to run his hands across the curve of Steve’s back, to linger.

He’s fifteen. He’s been lingering longer. In the dark, cool nights -- nights he spends at the Rogers’ because Sarah works late and Winifred Barnes doesn’t mind -- he lays next to Steve in bed and counts Steve’s even breaths and lingers even more in the furthest corners of his mind. What it would be like, he wonders, to lean over and kiss the splash of freckles on Steve’s shoulder, to drag kisses lowers down Steve’s crooked spine. How wonderful and terrible it is, to lay next to Steve and muffle his release with a hand across his mouth when he could reach out and touch.