Dream
Bucky dreamed in shades of red.
He’s out in the field marching shoulder to shoulder with his men just like that first time always like that and there’s red running through him like fear and he’s shaking and the sun is setting and there’s red pouring over him from the sky and he can see it on his hands the red sunset but it’s not the sunset it’s tacky and slick on his palms and there’s red running through him like terror and he can see it all around him the red flowers peeking through the trees but they’re not flowers they’re eyes all of them watching and he’s trying to warn his friends or maybe he just wants to scream but he’s drowning in red and he’s trying to fight back but it’s too late and he can feel it every time pulls the trigger his lungs getting tighter he’s going to drown he’s going to die and his friends they’re dying it’s his fault all his fault -
Bucky jerked awake gasping for breath, fighting to drag air into lungs that still felt tight and sealed-off. All he could think about as he cycled through the panic, separating the reality of the rough canvas walls around him from the bloody fields emblazoned on the backs of his eyelids, was that at least this time he hadn’t woken himself up screaming. Instead there was someone else shouting in the distance, their voice cutting through the haze of red still skewing Bucky’s vision.
“Barnes, c’mon.” The gruff voice of a soldier, sounding from just outside the opening of Bucky’s tent. “Chow time.”
That was familiar, at least. Finally the roar of blood in Bucky’s ears began to quiet.
“Yeah, I’ll be there, one second,” Bucky called, doing his best to control the inevitable tremor in his voice. He knew he was hardly keeping any secrets; they all had nightmares, all kept waking up disoriented and convinced they were reliving the last awful thing they’d seen out in the field. But they also all had an unspoken agreement: they pretended nothing was wrong. They didn’t acknowledge each other’s nightmares, and they certainly didn’t acknowledge their own.
Maybe it was better that way, Bucky reasoned as he sat and waited for his hands to stop shaking. It saved them all a bit of pride. And besides, it had to be easier to keep the dreams to himself than to try to verbalize them, to actually confront the rabid fear and awful guilt hovering just under the surface.
Sometimes, though, after the particularly bad nights, he thought it might be nice to talk about them. Just for the assurance that maybe he wasn’t the only one slowly but surely falling apart.
Once he was finally sure he’d be able to hold himself together, Bucky got up and wandered to the mess tent, taking pains to ground himself in reality. The familiar buzzing energy of the camp waking up for the day, the faint smell of oatmeal overpowered by the stink of men who’d gone a little too long without a wash, the heat of the summer sun as it broke over the horizon - they all felt real and solid, a far cry from the hazy half-developed world of his nightmares. Bucky felt a pat on his shoulder, too firm to have been anything but real, and turned to see Dugan grinning at him, his wide smile barely covering his poorly-disguised concern. Bucky felt grateful in spite of himself.
“Mail delivery today,” Dugan said in lieu of a greeting. That news was one thing guaranteed to raise anyone’s spirits, and Bucky couldn’t help but perk up a little. Mail brought with it the promise of contact with the outside world - which, most importantly, meant contact with Steve.
Sure enough, Bucky had a single tattered envelope waiting for him alongside his underwhelming breakfast of bland oatmeal and somehow blander coffee. He thought he ought to be used to it by now, but his heart still never failed to flutter every time he saw Steve’s crisp, neat handwriting gracing a page. As he sat down to eat, he tore open the wrinkled letter with hurried anticipation and began to read.
All the talk of work and travel should have scared him, but as Bucky scanned the words he hardly had the presence of mind to notice what they said. He was too busy relishing the fact that he had something of Steve, something real to hold onto against the uncertainty of everything else. He was about to reread the letter, really take in what Steve was saying, when he noticed the postscript scrawled at the bottom in uncharacteristically rushed handwriting.
P.S. I sent you something else. It’s just a little thing I did, not really finished, but it makes me think of you when I see it. Since I’ve got the real thing here, I thought it might do you some good.
Curious, the letter’s contents momentarily forgotten, Bucky slid his fingers back into the envelope, feeling out the folded edge of another piece of paper. As he pulled it out, his breath caught in his chest, and suddenly he was back where he’d started that morning, tight lungs fighting for air.
Steve had perfectly rendered a sketch of their little apartment, everything laid out in achingly familiar detail. There was their tattered sofa with the radio beside it where they’d sit to listen to baseball games during the hot summer months. Behind it was the window to the fire escape where they spent rare evenings off work talking about nothing while they watched the sun set past the skyline in the distance. The charcoal lines all stood out against the smudge of a red scarf draped over the back of that black-and-white couch. Bucky felt his lips twitch up into a nostalgic smile as he remembered knitting that scarf, remembered Steve grumbling about it but still keeping it wrapped around his neck everywhere he went.
The whole sketch was beautiful and tinged with memory, but Bucky’s eyes were stuck on the tiny details of clutter Steve had added near the front door. There were two pairs of shoes lined up side by side, one large and one small, both with newspaper poking out of the toes. Above them hung two coats on a familiar, dented coat rack, Steve’s smaller, threadbare tan coat draped next to Bucky’s brown one with the patched elbows. Bucky had to quickly glance away from the paper when he felt tears starting to prickle at the corners of his eyes just from thinking about it - about walking back through that door, hanging his coat up beside Steve’s and vowing never to leave him again.
But he couldn’t let himself think about that, not now. Not when he wasn’t so sure that the person who’d marched out of that apartment for basic training all those months ago was the same one that might one day come stumbling home from the war.
Still, as he packed up his gear, Bucky made sure to keep the drawing close. It wasn’t quite a photo like so many of the other guys had, but to Bucky it was better. It was the world through Steve’s eyes, just as Bucky had always wanted to see it. With memory weighing heavily on him, Bucky slipped the drawing into his pocket just as he’d seen Fred do, settling it as near as he could to his heavy and aching heart.
Bucky still remembered the first time he’d met Steve. He’d been six years old to Steve’s five, and they’d both been sent to the same elementary school in Brooklyn. Bucky, much as he'd pretended otherwise, hadn’t minded school, but Steve seemed to hate it. He was always fidgeting, scribbling in the margins of his papers and kicking at neighboring desks with his small feet. He’d been smaller than the other kids, even back then, but he more than made up for it with his big mouth.
Steve’s temper had been getting him into trouble since the beginning. Bucky remembered schoolyard fights as early as kindergarten, bigger boys picking on Steve for one reason or another and Steve never once just letting it slide.
Bucky hadn’t wanted to fight, back then. He’d hated even watching it, kids taunting Steve until Steve threw himself at them, tiny fists flying. Bucky could hardly stand seeing Steve getting picked on, could hardly stand the yelling and teasing and occasional scrapes and bruises that came along with it. In the end, it was half for Steve’s benefit and half for his own that he one day gave in and marched away from his baseball game at recess to break up what looked like yet another fight.
Bucky wound up facing down three bullies with no idea what to do, but Steve with his shining eyes had been staring at him like he didn’t quite know what to make of him, and Bucky knew he had to figure out something. If only to make sure Steve kept looking at him like he was maybe something special.
“Leave him alone , ” Bucky forced out, voice shaking. He felt his hands clench into fists. It felt wrong, unfamiliar.
“Or what?” A bigger kid sneered. The way they were surrounding Steve was making him look especially small and alone. Bucky hated it.
“Or I’ll… fight you,” Bucky’s fists were suddenly raised, almost involuntarily. He hated fighting, but not as much as he hated seeing Steve get hurt.
“You’re on.” The bigger kids raised their bigger fists. Bucky couldn’t remember exactly, but he was pretty sure he was the one that threw the first punch.
When Bucky finally pulled Steve out of the fight, Steve barely had a scratch on him. Bucky may have hated fighting, but he was good at it.
“I’m Steve,” the boy he’d saved had said later, holding out a hand to shake.
“James,” Bucky had replied, and pretended not to see his own bloody knuckles as he reached out to return the handshake.
It was only a matter of time before someone took note of Bucky’s gift for marksmanship. Back in training he’d practically been showing off, excelling at target practice with ease and gladly taking the praise that came with it. He was hardly surprised, then, when his standard-issue infantry rifle was swapped out for a more complicated model, boasting heavier machinery with a sniper’s scope. The upgrade had come with a promotion; he was now Sergeant Barnes, second in command and tasked with keeping the boys below him safe whenever he could.
More often than not that safety came at the cost of Bucky being sent off alone with strict orders to pick off targets from a distance.
And he was good at it. He wasn’t sure why , exactly, just kept trying to reason that maybe he was especially coordinated or had especially sharp eyes or was especially adept at calculating wind speed and distance and the trajectories of the bullets leaving his gun - all of which made sense while they were still practicing on rusty barrels or targets painted on tree bark.
But out in the field… it had to take a certain type of person to be good at what he did, didn’t it? To line up a shot with perfect aim and feel a second of complete and utter calm just before pulling the trigger?
With his new gun strapped to his back, weighing heavily on him as he trekked through the woods, Bucky thought back to schoolyard fights, to bloody noses and bruised fingers. It had all been for Steve, to protect him, keep him out of trouble. Bucky hadn’t ever liked it. He hadn’t actually wanted to fight. He still didn’t, and surely that had to count for something. (Right?)
Because Steve had always been sick as a kid, he hadn’t been able to do the kinds of things Bucky and the rest of the boys their age did, like play baseball in the summer or have snowball fights in the cold. He’d made up for it by drawing, spending long days in bed with a pencil in his hand and Bucky curled up beside him with a book. Steve was never satisfied with his art, always erasing stray marks with a furrowed brow, trying to get the shapes or the light or the shading down perfectly. Bucky never really understood that - he thought Steve was the best damn artist around - but he didn’t mind watching, loved watching that familiar look of focus spread across Steve’s face when he was drawing something he really cared about.
Steve got a version of that look when he was drawing his mother, bringing out a quiet strength in her tired eyes. He even got it when he drew Bucky’s father once, reading a tenderness into the normally hard lines of his face. When Bucky most remembered that look, though, was one particular day in high school art class.
Bucky still remembered it perfectly, down to the sound of the radiator humming in the corner as pencils dashed across pieces of paper. They were drawing portraits that day - which, for most, meant learning the basic lines and shapes comprising a human face. Bucky was doing his best to sketch out the face of his sister, but he couldn’t quite seem to bring all the shapes together into one cohesive image. Steve, on the other hand, was working tirelessly, brow wrinkled in that familiar look of concentration that Bucky had come to associate with his best art. Bucky tried to hold back his curiosity, but as the minutes ticked by and that look of concentration only got more intense, he couldn’t help it. He quickly glanced away from his own lopsided drawing to Steve’s paper, just hoping to catch a glimpse of whatever it was - and his breath caught in his throat.
It was them. Steve had drawn the two of them side by side, the pencilled-in Steve looking over to the drawing of Bucky, who stared into the distance past the edge of the cream-colored page. Steve had left himself relatively rough, only filling in the basic lines and shapes of his face, but Bucky was rendered in excruciating detail. Bucky glanced quickly away, cheeks flooding with heat. He felt like he’d seen something private, though Steve, still staring at the drawing with complete focus, didn’t appear to notice or care.
Bucky tried to return to his own drawing, but his hands were shaking so much he could hardly keep hold of his pencil. He didn’t know, really, what the big deal was - he’d seen plenty of Steve’s art, and Steve drew people all the time. This shouldn’t have been anything special. Still, something about the drawing - about being seen like that, presented to the world exactly the way Steve saw him - left him feeling something he’d never felt before, something he didn’t think he could get rid of even if he tried.
Bucky knew where his unit was headed now. He’d picked up enough scraps of information from his superiors to gather that they were making their way across the whole of Sicily to the beaches on the other side. And after that, across the sea, all the way to the beaches of Italy, provided they were lucky enough to survive the landing. It never stopped, the constant march forward, the constant promise of new threats lurking just beyond the horizon.
It was Bucky’s job to protect his men. He knew that, and he worked hard to keep his mind clear, save that thought, every time he set up his gun. He repeated it like a mantra as he climbed up to a lookout point above the island’s eastern beaches and set up his rifle under the shade of a well-placed tree. He repeated it as he knelt and peered through the scope, taking a moment to adjust to the jarring, bird’s-eye perspective.
It wasn’t long before he located his assigned targets. Their dark uniforms helped them blend almost seamlessly in with the lengthening evening shadows, but the camouflage wasn’t enough to protect them from Bucky’s sharp eyes.
It’s your job, just do your job , Bucky thought, lining them up in his sights. Even with the wide distance between them, Bucky was practically able to make out their faces in the dark. Or at least, he could have. If he’d been looking. But he knew better.
He was just doing his job. Careful aim, a steady breath, a twitch of the trigger twice in quick succession, and it was over.
At least, it should have been. But if Bucky kept playing the moment of impact over in his mind, watching blood spurt as men toppled to the ground on a sickening loop in his brain…
That was between him and his own spiralling thoughts. Nobody needed to see him like that, vulnerable and guilty and scared. He’d done his job, and that was all anyone needed to know.
That day after art class, Bucky and Steve had walked home side by side, just like they did every day. This time, though, Bucky kept losing track of the thread of their conversation. His eyes kept drifting to the portfolio tucked under Steve’s arm, the corner of his portrait assignment peeking out the edge. He was so distracted that he hardly noticed that Steve had stopped walking until he felt a tug on his sleeve, forcing him to pause and turn so that he and Steve were standing face to face. Steve was always bold, never shy about anything, so it scared Bucky a little to see him worrying at his lower lip with his teeth, not quite meeting Bucky’s eyes.
Bucky waited, watching Steve’s eyes move from Bucky’s face to the folder under his arm and back again. Finally, he took a deep breath and spoke.
“D’you wanna see what I drew?”
Bucky smiled as casually as he could, trying not to betray the nervous excitement radiating through him. “‘Course, Stevie. You know I love the way you draw.”
Steve pulled out his portfolio, not quite meeting Bucky’s eyes as he did it. The portrait he’d drawn that day was at the top of the stack, and he handed it to Bucky with something almost like reverence.
“It’s us,” Steve said quietly, as though Bucky couldn’t see that, as though his heart wasn’t bursting out of his chest with a thousand explosive feelings he couldn’t even name.
Steve had finished out the portrait, filling in his own face as well as Bucky’s. The Steve in the drawing was made of all hard lines and angry shadows. He looked sharp, and sick, maybe - all except his eyes. His eyes, almost soft in the harshly drawn face, were trained on… well, it was Bucky, but not in any way that Bucky had ever seen himself. He looked like a character out of one of those superhero comics Steve was always reading, tall and strong and brave. He was positioned near Steve, all soft where Steve was sharp, though the lines separating them bled together where their faces met on the paper, the styles mixing as their individual features melded in the middle. Looking at it, all those unfamiliar feelings swirling inside him were starting to fall into place.
Steve saw him, and to Steve he was beautiful. Steve had held out that drawing, had let Bucky see himself exactly the way Steve saw him - saw them . It felt brave, and vulnerable, and like every schoolyard fight and couch-cushion sleepover, every whispered conversation in the back of a classroom, every day they’d spent together simply because they couldn’t fathom spending it apart, suddenly made sense. That was the first time Bucky looked at Steve and thought I love you without pretense.
Bucky read Steve’s letter over and over in the dim light of their camp’s fire as it burned low into the night. In the days since receiving that wrinkled envelope, Bucky had spent an almost inordinate amount of time staring at the drawing Steve had tucked inside, memorizing every line and shape, Steve’s distinct artistic style almost as familiar as the image itself. It was such a perfect testament to their life before , immortalized in print exactly the way Bucky had been dreaming about it ever since he’d left.
What he hadn’t spent as much time with, though, was the letter. Steve’s talk of work and travel, the “big changes” they entailed, felt bitter and wrong. He wanted to keep ignoring them, to keep imagining Steve back at their apartment working to make ends meet the way they’d always done and just waiting for Bucky to come back - but now, faced with the prospect of writing out a response, Bucky had to confront the reality that the world was changing, and Steve was getting swept right along with it.
And working for the military, no less. Thinking about it had Bucky’s mind circling back to wide-open fields stained with blood, to Fred’s crumpled body lying among the flowers, to Steve getting caught up in all the fighting and bleeding and death. He quickly tried to wipe the thought from his mind.
It was just a job, he reasoned. At least Steve hadn’t managed to actually enlist. He’d still be safe from the worst this war had to offer. It wasn’t the end of the world.
Dear Stevie, he managed, finally.
Glad to hear you’re doing okay. You know I can’t help but worry, but that’s just what we do. Don’t think I’ve stopped worrying about you since we were kids and I was saving your ass from those bullies on the playground. Remember that? You worried about me too, I think. Like that time I busted my hands up fighting, and you made me come home with you to put some ice and bandages on them before you let me go. Can hardly do that now, so I guess this is the best we’ve got, this worrying back and forth.
Unbidden, Bucky felt a lump rising in his throat, and he swallowed hard to keep tears from forming at the memory of Steve, all soft around the eyes as he wiped blood from the scrapes on Bucky’s hands.
In all the intervening years between their childhoods and now, Bucky had spent considerable time wondering whether he was someone Steve could love. He’d thought so, sometimes, in moments of lingering glances and offhand comments, moments full of that rare softness Steve reserved just for him. Even then, though, when the worst Bucky had done was give another kid a black eye, he’d had his doubts. Steve was one in a million, and Bucky had counted himself lucky to just exist somewhere in his orbit.
What would Steve think of him now, when most of his dreams and all his waking hours were consumed by nothing but gunfire and smoke? Could Steve love him, now? Looking at his hands in the flickering firelight, picking out the scars and callouses from fights, both old and new, Bucky wasn’t sure.
The new job sounds amazing. I always knew you were gonna make it as an artist - never once thought you’d have the military to thank for it, but also never thought I’d get an all-expenses-paid trip to Italy and not enjoy a single second of it, so. Times change. They’d better be treating you right - if this drawing you sent me was anything to go by, they’ve got a real talent on their hands. Oughta be giving you the star treatment and all.
Thank you, by the way. For the drawing. You were right - I really do miss New York, but when I think about going back “home,” Brooklyn’s hardly the first thing on my mind. No matter where I was, if I could just see our coats and shoes lined up like that, newspaper and patches and all, I’d be alright.
Bucky wanted to go further. He wanted to tell Steve I miss you so much, I’d rather be anywhere else, as long as I was with you. He wanted to say I’m scared, nothing makes sense anymore and without you I can’t figure out where I fit into it all. He maybe just wanted to say I love you , but in the end he couldn’t seem to find the words. He hovered his pencil over the page for a long moment, debating, before signing off.
Congrats again on the fancy job. Just don’t get so busy you forget to write?
Love,
Bucky