Bright
Bucky was alone across the ocean and very nearly bored out of his mind.
He wasn’t sure what he’d expected, really, just that the newsreels they played at home made war look exciting, and dangerous, and he’d thought he might have at least faced off against a couple of Nazis by now instead of just reprising the low-grade stress of boot camp on another continent. But here he was, halfway across the world and doing exactly… nothing.
“You ready, Barnes?”
Bucky looked up from the gun draped across his lap. He’d been sitting under the shade of a tree near the base where he was currently stationed while he waited for his training session to begin, studying the workings of the long-range rifle he’d been given once they’d landed in Sicily. He was honestly a little miffed about being interrupted; it was gorgeous outside, the weather balmy in early spring, just a hint of sea breeze in the air to remind him of the docks back home. He was perfectly content to keep sitting there with his uniform jacket off, letting the sun warm his bare arms while he familiarized himself with his new gun. In spite of himself, he almost liked spending time just looking over the weapon, identifying all the various parts and figuring out how they came together to work in tandem. Still, the guy interrupting him was Fred Williams, and Bucky owed it to him to be pleasant.
“God, yeah. I’m just glad they’ve finally got us doing something.”
Williams grinned at him, offering a hand to help Bucky up.
The benefit of being sent off into the unknown, Bucky had realized, was that he and all the other men were on equal footing here. The uncertainty that governed all of their lives had forced them into a sort of camaraderie by necessity, and, in spite of the circumstances, it wasn’t half bad. Plenty of the guys—Dum Dum Dugan, Gabe Jones, Jim Morita, among others—had proved good company for the long days that dragged by without a hint of action, but Bucky found himself more often than not in the company of Fred Williams from basic in New Jersey.
Bucky figured they got along so well because the two of them genuinely had a lot in common; they were both from New York, though Fred was from upstate while Bucky had spent his whole life in the city. They were both baseball fans, which Bucky was generously willing to consider a point in both their favor even though he was a die-hard Dodgers fan and Fred liked the Giants. And, maybe most importantly, they both had someone special waiting for them back home, someone outside the bounds of the little temporary base near Sicily’s western beaches to occupy their every waking thought.
“Heard some good news today,” Fred said, a little spring in his step as he walked alongside Bucky away from the tents comprising the temporary base and out toward the training fields beyond the camp.
“Oh yeah?” Bucky’s voice wavered as he struggled to adjust to the unfamiliar weight of the rifle on his shoulder.
“Yep. Bet’cha can’t guess what it is.”
Bucky rolled his eyes. Only one thing got Fred this excited, and it certainly wasn’t mandatory weapons training. “We getting mail in today?”
“You know it,” Fred said dreamily, eyes getting that faraway look that Bucky knew well, the one that meant he was lost in thoughts of home. Bucky knew that, for Fred, home was with his fiancée. Over the course of the past few weeks Bucky had learned all about her. Her name was Rose, and if Fred could be believed, she had the prettiest eyes and the smartest mouth of any girl in New York. Fred had proposed to her just before leaving for basic, and Rose had promised to wait for him.
She wrote him every day. Bucky tried not to get too jealous about it.
“Guess you’ll have another bundle of letters waiting for you, huh?” Bucky asked, working to keep his tone pleasant rather than bitter. “Your girl really knows how to make a man feel special.”
“Oh, you don’t know the half of it,” Fred said, still lost in that dreamy nostalgia. Bucky snorted out a laugh.
“What about you though, Barnes?”
“Huh?”
“You expecting any mail today?” Fred raised his eyebrows, eyes glittering as he looked to Bucky for an answer. Bucky tried for a casual shrug, but the teasing glint in Fred’s eyes told him he wasn’t getting off that easy.
“I don’t know, I mean, my sister might write me if she gets the chance…”
And that was true, he was sure Becca would get him a letter eventually. But it was clear that both he and Fred knew that Bucky’s sister wasn’t who they were really talking about.
“Oh, come on,” Fred teased. “I see how you get every time they start passing out mail, like you’re waiting on something special, then you get all sad when it doesn’t come. You ever gonna tell me who she is?”
Bucky laughed a little wildly, trying to hide the way his heart had started hammering in his chest.
“I told you, it’s no one! I don’t have a girl, not like you do.”
Bucky didn’t have a girl, he had Steve. But as the days dragged by, as mail deliveries came and went without so much as an acknowledgement from Steve, Bucky was beginning to doubt even that. He’d sent off a telegram to Steve at the first opportunity, as soon as he knew he was being sent over to Sicily on the heels of the more experienced men who’d paved the way for the invasion. It was a half-terrified attempt at reaching out in case the worst happened, a half-desperate plea for Steve to keep his promise and not forget Bucky now that they were on opposite sides of the ocean. It had been entirely fruitless so far, as he hadn't received so much as a word in response.
“You know I don’t believe you for a second, right?” Fred’s voice cut into Bucky’s morose thoughts. They were nearly at the training field, a wide green clearing framed with trees that stretched out so far that Bucky could swear he could see the faint sparkle of the ocean on the other side. The stacked barrels that served as their targets were set up so far away that they looked like hardly more than pinpricks against the horizon. Bucky found himself getting excited for the challenge, but he couldn’t think about that yet — not with Williams on his case, threatening to uncover the not-secret that was Steve.
“Dunno what to tell you,” Bucky said as impassively as he could. “Can’t just tie myself down to one girl, wouldn’t be enough of me to go around!” He spoke the last words loudly, making sure they carried far enough for the other men milling around by the edge of the clearing to hear them. He was rewarded with some good-natured snickering, but Fred wasn’t among those laughing.
“I’m gonna figure you out one of these days, Barnes,” Fred said, seeing right past the shallow smirk Bucky had plastered onto his face. “Just you wait.”
As monotonous as most of the drills they ran through every day on the base were, Bucky found that he actually enjoyed target practice. He wasn’t sure why, exactly — the best he could come up with was that it was nice to be good at something, nice to be able to show off a little and hear the mixed encouragement and awe from his fellow soldiers and his superiors alike when he pulled off a particularly tricky shot. Beyond that, though, there was an undeniable little thrill that came with making the shot itself. Lining up the target in his sights, taking a fortifying breath, pulling the trigger, watching the bullet fly to hit its mark — it was almost like a ritual, a display of power over which he had total control. Out here in a foreign country at the behest of someone else, living every day according to a set of rules he’d had no say in making, that small modicum of control was as necessary as it was exhilarating.
Most days, the ritual of target practice had Bucky fully immersed, his world narrowing until it was just him, his gun, and the barrels he had to knock down. Today, though, his mind kept straying back to his conversation with Williams.
Mail was coming, he thought as he stepped up to take his turn. If previous deliveries were anything to go by, that would mean it would be a great day for Fred and his inevitable bundle of letters, and another day of forced smiles and poorly disguised disappointment for Bucky. It was getting unbearable, the uncertainty borne of Steve’s closed-off silence. Was Steve still upset with him? Was he just busy making ends meet without Bucky’s extra income and couldn’t find time to write? Was it something else entirely, something worse?
Bucky hissed out a quiet curse as he watched bullets fly from the end of his gun, missing the stacked barrels by a mile each time. He tried to take a deep breath, get his hands and eyes back in sync with each other, but it was proving difficult. His mind was overrun with images of Steve, playing through all the various explanations for his total lack of contact.
What if last year’s pneumonia was back? What if he couldn’t find work and was going hungry? What if he didn’t make it through the winter? What if, what if, what if…?
What if he was doing so well for himself that he’d decided he really didn’t need Bucky after all?
Once his magazine emptied, Bucky lowered his gun, surveying the field before him. The amount of barrels left standing spoke to just how unimpressive his performance had just been, but, even as he turned to see disapproval and disappointment in the eyes of the other men, it was hard to care.
Maybe Steve truly wanted nothing to do with him anymore, and maybe not. But he wasn’t going to rest until he at least found out. As he packed up his equipment and headed back to camp, he was already composing a letter in his head.
Bucky lay awake in his bunk that night, staring at a blank piece of paper in the flickering lamplight. He could hear paper rustling from somewhere down the line of cots, in all likelihood the sound of Fred tearing into his bundle of letters. Bucky’s prediction about the mail delivery had been correct; he’d been lucky enough to get a quick letter from his sister letting him know how things were at home, but still nothing at all from Steve.
Steve was too stubborn for his own good. Bucky knew that, intimately, from all those winters of “ no, Buck, I don’t want your jacket ,” and “ yes, Buck, I am going to work in this weather .” Bucky had always loved him all the more for it, even if it caused him unreal amounts of anxiety trying to pull Steve out of trouble time and again — but if Steve’s stubbornness, on top of what Bucky now realized was his own, was working to drive them apart, Bucky would have to draw the line. He picked up his pencil ready to surrender.
Dear Steve,
I miss you. Sorry to start straight off with that but it’s true and I needed to say it. I hate being here without you, not knowing how you are or what you’re doing. God, I hope you’re okay. I don’t think we’ve gone this long without talking to each other since we were maybe twelve, and I hate it.
I’m sorry if you’re upset. You have to know I never wanted this, me all the way across the ocean and you at home. You know I’d be back in New York in a heartbeat if I could be. Maybe that’s wrong of me, not wanting to fight, but I’d take a spring in that stuffy, smelly apartment with us stuck way too close together over one out here in the middle of nowhere alone, no question.
Don’t worry about me, though. It’s not so bad here. The weather’s nice, and the other guys aren’t bad company. None of ‘em are half as good as you, though, not that it’s even fair to compare. Wish you could meet some of ‘em. Dugan’s the funniest, can turn anything into a joke, and this guy Williams is good to talk to. He’s got a girl in New York, you know? I like to hear him talk about home, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me a little homesick, too.
Speaking of New York, I hope it’s not too cold there. You’d better be using that coat I left you – God knows I don’t have any use for it anymore. Besides, I’m not there, so I’m sure ignoring my advice and catching a cold won’t be half as satisfying for you now. Punk.
Seriously, though, take care of yourself. Can’t leave me all alone out here with no one to write to, can you? Try not to get your skinny ass into too much trouble without me. And write me, maybe? Pretty sure I already said it, but I do miss you. Hope to hear from you soon.
Yours,
Bucky
He read over the letter until someone blew the lamp out and he could no longer make out the words on the page through the darkness. It was fine, he thought — as good as it probably could be, given the circumstances. Still, there was so much it didn’t say. It wasn’t like there was anything more it could say, as anything specific was bound to be redacted before the letter actually made its way stateside, and anything he really wanted to tell Steve faced more obstacles than just military secrecy.
If the letter got Steve to talk to him, though, it was worth it. Even if Steve never really read between the lines, never saw what Bucky was actually trying to tell him. If Bucky could just get a letter back, that would be enough.
He fell asleep that night with the folded letter still clutched against his chest, aching with loneliness and the weight of all the things he couldn’t say.