Chapter 5
In hindsight, Steve should have known.
His entire life revolved around Bucky. They were a package deal and always had been, whether they were on the elementary school playground or out at the dance halls or wandering through the Stark expo or holed up in their little apartment together. If Steve was really honest with himself, he might admit that most of his fruitless attempts at enlistment had been less about actually getting to serve and more about finding a way to follow Bucky wherever he went, to keep him close just the way he always had been. It was everywhere, really, the incriminating evidence of just how deep Steve’s feelings ran - even his sketchbook, a visual chronicle of everything taking up space in his mind, was filled to the brim with pictures of Bucky.
He’d never thought much of it before. Between their childhoods and now, Bucky’s face was probably the one he’d seen the most. It only made sense that, with all that exposure, Bucky’s face would start bleeding into his art. But paging through the little leather-bound book now, with all these new and terrifying feelings running through him, Steve couldn’t help but find it striking, almost scary. For every half-rendered landscape or hurried figure drawing, there was at least one portrait - and of all the portraits scattered throughout the book, Steve would be hard-pressed to find one that didn’t at least resemble Bucky.
It was a cold evening in late February, and Steve, having just finished a double shift at the grocer’s, was perched at the kitchen table, scanning over the various versions of Bucky taking up residence in his sketchbook. He was hoping to get some drawing done before the exhaustion of the day hit him full force and he’d need to crawl into bed, but keeping himself awake was proving difficult - and the previous night’s events certainly weren’t helping.
He’d woken up in the early hours of the morning to the sounds of real, honest-to-god screaming. He’d sat bolt upright, fists clenched in momentary readiness to fight, before he’d realized the sounds were coming from Bucky’s room. It was hardly the first time it had happened - since that first night the two of them had spent clinging to each other through the bathroom door, the nightmares had established themselves as near-nightly occurrences - but it was still jarring. No matter how often it happened, Steve didn’t think he’d ever get used to hearing Bucky screaming like he might be dying and not being able to do a single thing about it.
He’d tried, the first couple of times it had happened, had gone and knocked on Bucky’s door or the door of the bathroom, sometimes offering water or a cool cloth, sometimes offering nothing more than company. But more often than not Bucky made it clear that he didn’t want the help, sometimes with clipped words, sometimes with silence punctuated by the little hitches of breath that meant he was crying and didn’t want anyone to know. So Steve mostly left him alone now. But that didn’t mean he felt good about it, and it didn’t mean he slept any easier.
And that was the problem, really - Bucky was living right alongside him, never more than a few feet away, but he still felt so distant, always hovering somewhere just slightly out of Steve’s reach. So even with his brain conjuring up dangerous thoughts like I think maybe I love you , Steve couldn’t begin to puzzle through it all, to stare into the depths of his emotions and figure out exactly what they meant. For that, he’d need Bucky, and Bucky seemed hell-bent on shutting him - and everyone else, for that matter - out.
Steve sighed, staring across the kitchen table at Bucky’s seat on the other side. It was empty, of course - it always seemed to be empty lately, with Bucky spending most of his time behind the locked door of his room. The only thing keeping Steve company at the table was the small pile of mail that had accumulated on Bucky’s side: three envelopes, all from Indiana, all unopened. Some small part of Steve almost felt gratified that he at least wasn’t the only one Bucky was ignoring, but mostly the sight of those unopened envelopes only served to make him sadder.
Steve hovered his pencil over the pages of his sketchbook, the pile of letters proclaiming to be from Winifred Barnes in full view. Bucky’s mother’s name, her familiar handwriting, had Steve lost in nostalgia for his and Bucky’s shared childhood, when their togetherness had simply been a given. He thought wistfully of sleepovers on the floor of the Barnes family living room, of the Sunday dinners spent together that preceded them. Of the wide, gap-toothed grin Bucky would always flash his mother as he lied about him and Steve having washed up before coming to the table.
Steve’s pencil started moving, practically of its own accord, until another version of Bucky materialized on the page. It was him at probably eight, his wide grin proudly showcasing a missing front tooth. Steve paid particular attention to getting that smile down just right. It didn’t matter whether Bucky himself was an ocean away or simply sealed off behind a locked door. Steve still knew exactly what his smile looked like.
Spring came especially slowly that year. The cold persisted all the way into March, and Steve felt bent under its weight, exhausted and constantly on the edge of a nasty cough, his fingers always stiff and verging on blue.
But he was willing to grin and bear it, the work and the cold and all the hardship that came with it, because the slow onset of spring brought with it something else. As the weather grew gradually warmer, Bucky was gradually coming back to him.
It started with him leaving the door of his room open a crack when he retreated there after breakfast in the mornings. Then it transitioned to him retreating there less and less often, electing to spend more time at the table, in the living room, sitting out on the fire escape.
Even better, he’d started smiling again.
They weren’t real smiles exactly - they were tight, pinched, never quite meeting his eyes. But they were, undeniably, smiles, and something about them felt like progress.
Bucky’s birthday happened to coincide with one of the first truly nice days of spring. When Steve woke up that day to find that the sunlight streaming in through the windows actually felt warm, he wanted to celebrate for more reasons than one.
“Happy birthday, Buck,” he said when Bucky came into the kitchen around midmorning. Steve’s heart sank when he laid eyes on him - he looked like hell, his tired eyes rimmed with red and at least three days’ worth of stubble on his face. But he managed a smile, albeit a small and wavering one, and the tight worry in Steve’s chest loosened its hold a little.
“Wish we could do something, make it more special,” Steve said, smiling apologetically as he poured them mugs of bitter, watered-down coffee. Between Bucky’s injury and how jumpy he still got every time he tried to leave the apartment, he hadn’t had much luck finding work, so Steve’s meager income had to suffice for the both of them, leaving them pretty short on options for entertainment. It wasn’t easy - even the coffee Steve was currently pouring constituted a luxury at this point - but Steve kept telling himself they’d be fine. After all, they’d made it through the entire Depression and hardly ever had more than one income between the two of them. Back then it had always been Bucky’s - it was only fair that it ought to be Steve’s now.
Bucky just shrugged, nursing his coffee. The lines of exhaustion in his face seemed especially pronounced today, and he let his eyes fall closed as he inhaled the steam coming off of his drink. When he blinked and saw Steve watching him, though, he forced himself to stand up a little straighter, forced a smile onto his face that to a casual observer would almost look believable. He’d always been good at putting on a brave face - but Steve had always been good at seeing through those faces. It was painfully obvious to Steve just how hard Bucky was trying now, but still, he’d started trying, and that in itself felt momentous.
“We don’t gotta do anything,” Bucky said, his voice a little rough but his painted smile staying intact. “Really. Still bound to be the best birthday I’ve had in a while.”
It wasn’t really funny, the casual reference to everything he’d gone through, everything he still staunchly refused to tell Steve about - but Bucky sounded so much like his old self in that moment that Steve couldn’t help but grin. Things weren’t perfect, but Bucky was trying, and so was he. Maybe one of these days they would really be okay.
It was a rare day off work for Steve. He spent it sitting on one corner of the couch with his sketchbook, and it was a testament to just how much Bucky was trying that he didn’t retreat back to his room after breakfast, but instead curled up on the opposite end of the sofa, a scant few feet away from Steve. There was warm sun pouring in from the windows, and the radio was playing something slow, and it didn’t take long for Bucky’s eyes to fall closed and his breath to turn long and deep with sleep.
Some combination of the sleepy calm smoothing over his face and the way he was sitting, burrowed against the arm of the couch with his knees pulled halfway up to his chest, made him look younger - or, at least, it erased the all the superficial markers of age he’d been sporting since he came home. Steve, his sketchbook already out and draped over his lap, couldn’t have kept from drawing him if he’d tried.
What materialized was Bucky as a teenager, his hair meticulously arranged in the slicked-back style he wore when they went out, the one he’d been so convinced made him look cool. His face was smooth, free of the new lines and shadows he’d come home with, and his smile was bright and just a little cocky. Steve looked over at the real Bucky’s face periodically as he drew, even though he didn’t need to, even though he had every line and shape of it already down by heart. The more he looked between them, the more he could imagine that the living, breathing Bucky in front of him still smiled like that.
But even if none of his smiles felt real these days, Bucky was here, warm and present and for once actually getting some rest, and on that sunny afternoon Steve loved him so intensely it was hard to breathe.
He didn’t say anything - couldn’t say anything, didn’t even know how to begin to verbalize the storm of feelings swirling inside him. So he just sat and relished the momentary peace. Somewhere between the sunlight and the music and Bucky right beside him, Steve found himself happier than he ever thought he could be.
Steve had thought it meant progress - Bucky willingly spending time with him, Bucky curling up on the couch and napping like a cat in a sunbeam, Bucky smiling that particular smile of his that meant things weren’t really okay but still seemed to hint that, soon, they might be. But as March crept on and that forced smile appeared more strained by the day, Steve was forced to concede that maybe the return of Bucky’s smile wasn’t quite the good omen he’d hoped it to be.
Because despite all those smiles, all those times he assured Steve that he was fine, Stevie, really, Bucky was still a brick wall. He had nightmares. He stared into space, got lost inside his head. He held himself tense and stiff like he was in pain more often than not. And every time Steve tried to talk to him, to do anything at all about it, he’d shut down.
“Come on, Bucky, just talk to me. Tell me what’s going on.”
Steve had come home from work to find Bucky sitting rigid and uncomfortable on the couch. At first he’d been thrilled to see him, thinking that this was shaping up to be one of those treasured evenings when they shared space, made dinner together and then retreated to the living room where Steve pulled out his sketchbook and Bucky made joking comments about his art as he drew. But it quickly became clear that something was wrong; Bucky’s skin was shiny with clammy sweat, and he was holding himself the tense, careful way that Steve had learned meant something hurt. Now Steve was desperately trying to figure out what, and Bucky seemed equally committed to not letting him.
“I told you,” Bucky managed past a smile that looked far more like a grimace. “‘M fine. Just - just tired.”
Steve moved to sit on the couch beside Bucky, but as he approached, Bucky shrank in on himself, swallowing hard and making an aborted grab for his left shoulder with his hand. The gesture was clear; it meant pain, the pain that inexplicably flared up in Bucky’s shoulder from time to time despite the fact that his injuries had been healed for weeks. Once he’d finally been able to eat, the strange bruises littering Bucky’s body had faded quickly, and the bandage had come off his stump arm soon after, but it hadn’t taken Steve long to discern from Bucky’s frequent grimaces and stiff body language that the area around his former injury still bothered him.
Steve held himself back from sitting down next to Bucky, not wanting to jostle the couch cushions and hurt Bucky further, but he couldn’t keep from narrowing his eyes. “Bullshit, you’re fine.”
Bucky tensed his jaw, his smile slipping as he glared at Steve in turn.
“You wanna tell me what’s going on?” Steve pressed.
“Fuck, Steve. I don’t know. ” Bucky bit out. “How am I supposed to know? I didn’t fucking ask for this, I don’t -” he cut himself off with a nauseous gulp, and had to stop arguing with Steve in favor of tilting his head back and resting it against the couch cushions with his eyes squeezed shut. Steve’s heart sank.
“Okay,” Steve said as placatingly as he could manage through his own frustration. “Can I at least do anything?” He hated seeing Bucky like this, rough and angry and wound up tight with pain - not least because it made the storm of deep, insistent feelings in his chest bubble to the surface, where they were that much harder to ignore.
Steve half-reached out to Bucky again, not even knowing what he’d do when they made contact, just wanting to find some way to bridge what felt like a swiftly widening gap between them. Bucky didn’t give him the chance - he jerked away, burying himself further in the corner of the couch.
“Dammit. Don’t - don’t touch me.” Bucky had gone pale, and his breathing was shallow and labored, making him appear hardly a moment from either getting sick or passing out. But he said, “Don’t need anything. I’m fine.”
“Fine.” Steve stepped back. No matter how much he wanted to stay and find some way to fix this, if Bucky didn’t want him around, he’d leave.
Steve turned back to Bucky once before leaving the room. “Dunno what you’re trying to prove,” he hissed under his breath. Bucky, sweaty and trembling with his face contorted in pain, didn’t give any indication that he’d heard. Steve sighed, defeated. Though it was usually Bucky, tonight Steve was the one to retreat to his room alone.
Under the glow of orange streetlight coming through his bedroom window, Steve pulled out his sketchbook, halfheartedly skimming through it. His heart twisted a little to look at all the pictures he’d drawn of Bucky - young, carefree, truly smiling, so different from the reality awaiting him outside his bedroom door. He rolled a pencil between his finger and thumb, trying to bring himself to create another one, another genuinely happy memory, but he couldn’t make one materialize.
When he finally put the pencil to paper, he ended up laying out the familiar shapes of Bucky before he even fully realized what he was doing. It was Bucky as he had been on his birthday, his face still worn and tired but for once smoothed over in sleep. As Bucky’s features materialized on the page, Steve tried adding in a few extra lines, an upward curve of his mouth that might almost count as a smile. After staring at it for a minute and trying to make it work, though, he flipped the pencil around to erase it. It looked so forced that even Steve couldn’t convince himself it was genuine. He settled on a neutral expression, not quite happy, but not pained either - the best he could hope for, most days.
Steve fell asleep with the sketchbook still spread out on the pillow beside him, so full of love and hurt that he could hardly tell the difference anymore.
Bucky emerged from his room most mornings with dark circles under his eyes and a tremor running down his arm.
“I’m fine,” he said, and smiled.
Bucky stepped out of the apartment occasionally, sometimes heading to some job interview or another, sometimes just making a run to the store on the corner. He’d come back empty-handed and pale, his eyes a little foggy.
“I’m fine,” he insisted when Steve asked, pulling on a half-smile that didn’t meet his still-distant eyes.
“Jeez, Buck,” Steve said tersely one morning in early April, bending down to scoop up the mail that had just been dropped under their door. “You ever going to write your Ma back?” He tossed the letters down on the kitchen table, one from Bucky’s mother sitting on the top of the pile. There were five of them now, permanently residing on the dining table and collecting dust. “Seems like she might be worried about you, y’know, having not heard from you in months and all…”
Bucky flinched a little, but looked up from where he was seated at the table to give Steve one of those infuriating tight smiles. “I will. I’ll get to it. It’s fine.”
Steve sucked in a breath, a frustrated remark on the tip of his tongue. It took every ounce of his swiftly draining patience to hold it back. “Fine. If you say so,” he said, knowing full well the letters wouldn’t be opened anytime soon.
Steve went to work early, stayed late for the extra hours’ pay. Between the long hours and the intermittent nights spent awake listening to nightmares through the walls, between the conflicting emptiness and sparks of frustration he felt every time he looked into Bucky’s face only to be met with one of those flat smiles and hear those blank insistences of ‘I’m fine,’ Steve felt like he hardly had a moment to breathe. When he finally found a free evening to pull out his sketchbook again, he hardly knew what to do with it anymore.
His fingers itched to draw Bucky again, to add another version of his smile to the pages - but he couldn’t bring himself to actually do it. Even though he knew the shape of it by heart, the smile Bucky wore nowadays felt so empty that it seemed hardly worth chronicling.
Steve ended up closing the book without making a single mark. It felt wrong to leave it behind, sitting on his nightstand collecting dust, but he did his best not to dwell on it. As Bucky always said - and as Steve kept trying to believe, like maybe believing would make it true - it was fine. He was fine.