The lights are off in the apartment.
The lights are always off in the apartment because they can’t afford to get them turned back on, and they don’t try to. The heady sunlight was enough during the day, and there were always candles lit from a struck twenty-cent matchbox when it wasn’t. The apartment itself is a goddamn shoebox, like James always says. “This apartment is a goddamn shoebox, Stevie,” he’d complain whenever he hit his head on the ceiling of the entryway coming in. He hits his head in the same way Stevie—Steve— remembered his dad doing when he was younger.
His mother always called his dad a victim.
“Your father is a victim, Steven. A victim of war, and don’t you ever be the same.”
And she’d wipe his tears and kiss his forehead and hug him too tight and for too long. The kind of bone-crushing hugs he started to miss as they paychecks James brought in stretched thinner and the nights got longer.
Sarah was a headstrong kind of young woman, barely twenty when she stumbled through Ellis Island and days from her thirty-eighth birthday when she died. When Steve Rogers looks into the dingy bathroom mirror, scraping the blond scruff from his gaunt jaw into the sink with the dull razor, he sees her. He sees these parts of her still taking up space in the world inside of him, those memories. He’s every bit of Sarah that she was, and James says he forgets it sometimes.
He’s infected with that American dream, and he knows it.
The streets are busy, his pocket change means nothing, and he feels the squish of the stuffed up, soggy New York Times filling the gaps in his loafers when it rains. His accent is watered down by that Brooklyn sickness that his father carried, and he doesn’t speak is native tongue as fluently as he did as a child. There are pronunciations he forgets, words lost to a first generation, but there are remnants of her life that never died. His mother was a devout Catholic, ending long hours tending the sick by kneeling before his father’s shrine and that oh-so sacred cross. Ma always said grace before dinner, smacking his hands away from sneaking bites, and she held them, too, with rosary beads cascading down the hospital sheets on his worst days.
Steve was always sick.
James used to run after him up and down the stairwell of their apartment complex when they were younger, pressing a heavy palm into his notched back while he caught his breath and coughed himself into a fit. He’d stay there, hand feeling Steve’s pale blonde fuzz on his thin back as he heaved, keeping him warm because his body can’t afford to. His hand to him always felt like God’s.
James had always been too close.
Sarah asked Steve some nights, the soft cotton of her dress creasing under his weight as she pets his hair by the fire. Asked him how he felt about James being that close to him. He misses the feeling of her calloused fingers raking across his nape, the soft vibration of her voice buzzing in chest as she held him like he was something worth being held.
He didn’t mind, Mama.
Not one bit.
James sleeps in the same bed as him now, a shit mattress on a shittier frame, and it creaks under the weight of them both as he shifts in his sleep with his face pressed into Steve’s hair. His snores tickle his forehead, and it’s the kind of comfort Steve can curl into and ache with empty hurt from when he wakes up cold and alone. James works long hours at the docks, hauling boxes from the ports with the kind of men who come home drunk to their wives and their lonesome, smelling like perfume, salty air and smoke. Steve chases that warmth when the sun hits, stale cigarettes and ocean water.
The bed’s hot and the sheets are sweaty, a pathetic twin sized mattress jutting out from where the thin frame is shoved against the wall. He’s swamped in his ma’s sheets, fighting the fabric off of himself as the heat sticks to his skin. He aches, heartbeat racing. His face is red and hot, legs half tangled in the blankets. He always wakes up in pain, the curvature in his spine made worse from the springs digging into his back.
Twenty is too young for him to feel so old.
His shower is freezing. It’s always freezing. Stevie Rogers and Bucky Barnes can’t afford groceries, let alone hot water. The economic and militaristic capital of the world had come to a steep decline. World War II is raging across the sea, swarming the papers and the radio, and the taxes are still too high from the first one to afford a hot shower.
The war to ‘end all wars'.
Sure, Wells.
It’s barely 1941, and there’s already been talk of Americans stepping in to help rally allied forces since that big Neutrality act. Steve lets his head hit the tile wall, cool uneven pressured water dripping down his back and leaving it mottled and shivering. He thinks about Bucky, the same guy who would shell out his last couple of cents just to have a little chocolate or get his hands on a torn-up book, and he can’t survive it.
Cash and Carry basis.
He shuts the water off and towels himself dry roughly, hoping FDR chokes on his fucking pen.
Everyone hates Roosevelt now. It’s fashionable. Any president trying to dip their toes into war, really. Wilson was a skunk according to Teddy, keeping everybody’s tongues tied if they didn’t want their father or son stepping off the front doormat and into the frontlines of hell. Steve saw what war did to people, what it did to his family. And now Roosevelt is a British suck up, a gibbering idiot, that ‘man in the White House’, a socialist. And New York advertised loudly, Lady Liberty shining overhead, that you could be anything in the melting pot of America, but you couldn’t be a socialist.
Or just about anything else.
Steve shakes the feeling of certain death from his mind, cleaning up the kitchen from Bucky’s early breakfast so he can use the same plate to choke down a piece of toast over. He watches the coffee pour down the drain as he rinses the dishes. His heart can’t handle it, but he makes sure to buy the good one because of the way Bucky holds it to his chest and sighs into it in the mornings. He plies his laundry into his ma’s old wicker basket afterwards, and it takes him on his hands and knees grabbing a stray sock under the nightstand to start crying about his mama.
Five years is long enough to grieve.
It’s been five whole years, and he can’t even do the laundry without breaking down.
Some days are harder than others, Bucky gripping his shoulders on a rare day off while his body racks with sobs with something painful enough to make him feel sick. But some days, he has to put himself back together and just try. Some days it’s just him, and he’s sitting on the bedroom floor alone, face wet with tears, holding a stray sock. Bucky can’t be there for him all the time, can’t baby him. He should be working; he should be doing more. But Buck tells him that he doesn’t want anything from him other than to just see him trying.
God, he tries.
He tries so hard.
He wants to crawl back into bed and quit trying.
He wants to hold himself like he’s not weak, like he’s not alone, like he’s not worthless. He wants to lie there and sob it all out until there isn’t anything left. Until he’s nothing but this shell of his pain. Just for a little bit.
He doesn’t. He does the damn laundry.
Because a ‘little bit’ always turns into ‘just a few hours’, and then he’s wasted a day rotting and feeling sorry for himself for being alive while Bucky’s killing himself to keep him going. Working long hours to pay for medications to keep him here when somedays it feels like he doesn’t even want to breathe. He runs the water in the tub and lets himself sob over the laundry as he watches himself from somewhere far away work soap into the fabric with shaking fingers.
He hangs it by the window to dry and drops down onto the couch.
When Stevie was little, he always used to imagine that if he curled up tight enough, he could disappear in on himself. That he could seep into the fabric and slip between the cracks like loose change.
He doesn’t. He keeps living.