Chapter 3
Steve didn’t tell Bucky that ever since he’d lived in New York, going to the MOMA had been one of his favorite things to do when he wasn’t at work or hanging with Nat. Sometimes he even managed to drag Nat along for the afternoon. All he did was nod, a faint smile on his lips, and follow Bucky up to the front doors. It was unusually quiet for a Saturday, Steve mused as he and Bucky made their way to check in their coats. A few people were milling around the entrance, leafing through pamphlets and talking in hushed voices, and beyond that a couple groups of others were making their way into the bellows of the museum. Steve handed his coat to the well-dressed man holding his hand out to him but kept his messenger bag slung across his body. He also noticed that Bucky kept his left glove, same as he had done at breakfast.
They wandered through the cavernous halls, walking in sync together even though they kept an appropriate foot or so between them. Steve wanted to step closer to Bucky, to shorten the distance and take his uncovered hand in his. He felt himself blush once again as he thought of what the skin of Bucky’s wrist would feel like under his fingertips. Once or twice, Bucky would stop in front of a painting and study it, his tongue darting out and licking his lower lip as he furrowed his brow. What Bucky didn’t know is that while he was staring at the paintings, Steve was staring at him. As much as Steve loved the art, he really did, there was no way his body could resist stealing glances at Bucky out of the corner of his eye. He should’ve felt guilty for wasting $25 just to stare at his companion for the day, but Bucky was a masterpiece all his own. And Steve couldn’t do anything but be absolutely hopeless at the sight of him.
The sharp ding of a cell phone pierced the silence that blanketed the gallery and Bucky reached into his back pocket, letting out a curse as the other two people wandering through shot him a dirty look. Steve flashed an apologetic smile at them, which they conveniently didn’t seem to notice.
“Fuck…I’ve gotta take this.” Bucky bit his lip, his brows knitted together anxiously and he jerked his chin towards the corner of the room. “I’ll just be over here…ok?”
Steve nodded. “Yeah. Take your time.”
As Bucky tensely shuffled away, Steve let out a sigh and set down on one of the wooden benches. His fingers tapped out a steady rhythm against the cool surface, but no matter how hard he tried to focus on the art in front of him, his gaze kept straying over to where Bucky stood. The itch to draw him came swelling back into Steve’s hands, making his heart race at the idea, and he reached into his bag to pull out his sketchbook. Flipping through towards the end of book, he stopped at a blank page and lifted his eyes to Bucky’s frame. His pencil scraped out the outline of his body; the broadness of his shoulders, the curvature of his spine leading down to his… Steve blushed as he completed the next part with hurried strokes. He drew Bucky’s jaw line as sharp as a razor, the days old stubble smoking over his chin and neck, and kept his long hair tucked over the ear that faced Steve, letting him grasp the likeness of Bucky’s face.
He was in the middle of trying to get the right plumpness of Bucky’s bottom lip when someone next to him asked, “Is that me?”
Steve whipped his head up from sketching and his stomach flipped when he saw Bucky staring back at him. Or, more accurately, staring down at Steve’s sketchbook. He resisted the impulse to snap it closed, wanting to pretend that there was nothing there, and instead nodded, his voice paralyzed by the fear that Bucky would see the sketch as something it wasn’t. Even though every single stroke of his pencil screamed otherwise.
Bucky’s face was unreadable as he scanned Steve’s sketch of him with careful eyes. With each second that went by, Steve held his breath and was debating on whether he should just get up and leave or spontaneously combust right there. He could hear his heartbeat in his ears, feeling like he might pass out before either of those options were available, when Bucky said softly, “Shit, Steve…it’s amazing.”
Steve’s insides melted into jello. It took him a few moments to even form a coherent thought before he managed to say, “Thanks.. I, uh, I hope it was okay for me to draw you?” He swallowed, the words now tumbling out. “I’m sorry I didn’t ask first, you were on the phone and I wasn’t thinking-”
“No, no, it’s okay. Really.” Bucky still hadn’t lifted his eyes from Steve’s lap, his right hand gripping onto the bench beneath them. There was another second of silence and Bucky spoke up again, his voice slightly higher than before. “Could I.. Could I look at your other sketches?”
Steve tensed. His sketchbook was something of a diary to him, a place where he could put down his thoughts and feelings in pictures instead of words. Only a few people ever saw its contents and Steve knew that if he showed the book to Bucky, there would be no turning back from what Bucky would see. Bucky was looking at him like he might take back his request, having noticed the tightening of Steve’s shoulders, but Steve placed the sketchbook gently in Bucky’s lap before he had the chance to open his mouth. “Yeah..go ahead.”
A long moment stretched between the two of them, lasting until Bucky started to slowly flip through the pages. Steve noticed that Bucky’s hand shook as he turned one page over the next, and in that slice of time Steve thought that Bucky understood how important his sketches were to him. Looking over across Bucky’s lap, Steve watched as he passed through the smiling lady in line at the ticket booth, and the man looking up at the train times who had run away with his jacket flapping like a cape. The more Bucky flipped backwards through the pages, the more Steve felt transported back in time. It was almost like he’d built a time machine, and all he had to do was look at a sketch to be flung straight into that moment.
Steve was so engrossed in the memories he’d created that he almost didn’t realize that Bucky had stopped flipping through the pages, his body still as he stared down at the portrait laid out before him. A sudden icy fear gripped Steve like a vice and his vision came into focus around the sketch of a woman. Not just any woman, but the woman.
The picture was full of soft lines and exquisite detail, all the way from how her hair framed her face right down to the dimple dotting the left corner of her mouth. She was captured mid-laugh, her eyes crinkled and her mouth wide open in a smile. She was incredibly beautiful, even in only black and white. Anyone looking at this picture would be able to tell that whoever had drawn it put love into every aspect of it’s creation, and that the woman had definitely loved the artist as well.
Steve felt like someone had punched him in the stomach.
“Who’s this?” Bucky asked, his voice so soft that Steve almost hadn’t heard him.
Steve closed his eyes, squeezing them shut until he was able to collect the pieces of himself that were now scattered across the museum floor. He answered quietly. “That’s…That’s Peggy.”
Bucky looked up at the sound of Steve’s voice. “The same Peggy that Nat spoke about?”
Swallowing painfully, Steve nodded and let out a shaky breath. He didn’t know how well he was going to hold up if Bucky was going to ask the questions Steve thought he might, but he couldn’t act like Peggy hadn’t existed either. He forced himself to sit up straight and kept his hands clasped together in his lap so tightly that they seemed fused together. You can do this. You can do this.
Bucky’s face softened as he looked at Steve and then back down at Peggy. “Was she your…?”
“Girlfriend, yeah.” Steve could already feel his heart rate start to pick up in anxiety. “She and I… we dated throughout college. Ohio State University.” Maybe if he added in miscellaneous details, he could distract himself from getting upset. Maybe he could even fool himself into thinking that could work, too.
“Was it a bad breakup?” Bucky closed Steve’s sketchbook gently and set it between them on the bench. “I mean, it’s none of my business but… you look really upset.”
“You could say that.” Steve let out a small humorless laugh, squeezing his hands even tighter around themselves.
“I’m guessing she broke up with you…?”
Steve shook his head quickly. “No, no…There wasn’t really an official breakup.”
“Ok…” Bucky’s eyebrows knitted together in confusion. “I’m not following.”
Steve had to pause to keep his voice from cracking and took a deep breath. “Peggy… She died. Three years ago, before I came to the city.”
After Steve’s confession, there was a silence so thick it felt like a wall between him and Bucky. An impenetrable wall that Steve’s words had built to keep Bucky from getting to close, and a silent warning that there was a road cracked and broken ahead. They sat there without saying a word for what felt like hours when Bucky finally said, his voice so gentle it almost felt like a caress, “Steve…I’m so sorry…”
“Don’t be. Please.” Steve ran a hand through his hair, breaking the bond with his other and stretched his fingers to ease the tension in them. “There wasn’t anything anyone could do to help anyway so…it’s better off that people aren’t sorry.”
“Steve, you can’t make people not feel awful about what happened. Even if it wasn’t their fault.”
Bucky was right, Steve knew, but that didn’t make him feel any better. Countless of times after people had found out that Peggy had passed, he was confronted with the many apologies and heartfelt letters to say they were sorry for his loss. He performed all the formalities and played the part of a polite grieving boyfriend, but the whole time all Steve had wanted to do was scream. He wanted to scream that nobody could possibly feel as awful as he did, that no one could ever be as sorry for his loss than he himself because she wasn’t just a person that could be consoled away with a few words on a fucking Hallmark card. She was a brand on his heart, and the only way that Steve would ever stop feeling sorry was to rip his heart out of his goddamn chest.
“You don’t have to answer this,” Bucky spoke up again, his words carefully chosen as if he thought that Steve might flinch away at any given moment, “But..what exactly happened to Peggy?”
It had been so long since Steve told the story about what happened to Peggy that sometimes he didn’t know where to start. Should he start at the beginning, when he met Peggy during his freshman year at college? He still hadn’t quite filled out his winter coat from high school, even with his ma’s attempts at fattening him up, and entered the school year having no clue how to make friends or to not make a fool of himself. He’d enrolled in an advanced literary course that studied the works of Alexander Hamilton, a former treasury secretary that history had left behind, and that’s where Peggy had swept him off his feet. Even on the first day in class he couldn’t take his eyes off of her, blushing slightly every time she managed to glance his way. She was beautiful and intelligent as hell, speaking with a voice so regal that it could silence any fool who tried to intimidate her. The second he saw her break into a smile, he’d been hooked. It took him weeks to even build up the courage to talk to her, and when their professor assigned them to be partners for a report, Steve could barely say a word without his stutter making a hideous appearance. Peggy, to his surprise, was patient with him and soon enough, Steve had forgotten to be nervous around her at all. She was still regal and bold and way out of his league, but she was also exceedingly kind and actually seemed interested in what Steve had to say.
“And it’s just so amazing how fucking dedicated he was to creating this country, you know? Like, he wrote basically entire novels and even went to front lines to give people a better nation to live in and I… God, I wish I was more like him.” Steve sighed, his rant over, and relaxed back into his chair.
Peggy was smiling over at him from where she sat on her bed, and in the heat of his passionate speech, Steve had almost forgotten she’d been sitting there. Which was ridiculous because it was her dorm after all, and she was the one who’d invited him over to study. He suddenly was afraid that she might laugh at him for everything he’s said, but when she opened her mouth all she said was, “You’re more like him than you think, Steve.”
A bright red flush began crawling up his neck, even reaching the tips of his ears. “Nah,” he said, brushing off Peggy’s compliment. “All I can do is draw. That, and pick fights.”
“Isn’t that what he did though?” Peggy sat up straighter, a habit Steve noticed that she did whenever she was going to say something important, and crossed her legs so elegantly she could’ve been the Queen of England herself. “Alexander Hamilton picked fights with people over things that mattered, things that he thought were important and ought to be resolved. He wasn’t afraid of starting a bit of trouble to get work done, and that’s what made him so influential. He was a rebel and an underdog. Now,” She looked at him pointedly and flashed that devastating smile of hers, “who does that remind me of?”
Steve had the fleeting thought that he would definitely pick a fight for her if he had to. “Who?”
A laugh like the chiming of a bell sung out into the room, and Peggy reached across the small space between her bed and the desk chair Steve sat in to poke his cheek with her finger.
“You.”
After the course had finished, he and Peggy kept in touch over the summer, mostly through texts, which consisted of Steve whining about how boring Ohio was and Peggy having the audacity to tell him ‘chin up, darling’ as she spent her summer visiting London. He’d learned that she and her parents had moved to the States from England when she was in her last year of high school, and that, she’d adorably admitted to him one night, she was self-conscious of her accent coming off snooty. To him, it was anything but, but he didn’t have the courage to tell her that.
When he wasn’t acting sore of Peggy’s adventures, he worked away his summer at a family friend’s hardware store, lifting lumber and stocking shelves for hours on end. He came home every night and could barely even sit down before he gobbled up whatever his ma made for dinner, which pleased her immensely. It wasn’t long before Steve put on a few pounds of muscle and according to how short his jeans were getting, puberty had finally caught up to him as well. He walked into his first day of classes with a new perspective, quite literally, and was incredibly nervous as he approached Peggy at the Starbucks located inside the Union.
He’d stood dumbly at the end of her table for a few moments, clearing his throat in hello and bracing himself for her reaction to his transformation. In slow motion almost, she raised her head, looking just as breathtaking as the day they had left campus, and took in the sight of him with surprised eyes. It was a few moments before either of them said anything and Steve had blurted the first thing that came to mind. Would she, Peggy Carter, like to go out on a date with him?
A smile, her gorgeous heartbreaking smile, spread onto her lips and Steve almost passed out as she answered ‘yes’. He wanted to drop onto his knees and thank God himself for finally kicking Steve’s growth spurt into gear, but Peggy stopped that train of thought in its tracks by saying pointedly that she would have gone on a date with him last year if he had ‘bucked up the courage to ask’.
Steve loved Miss Peggy Carter like no other.
Throughout the next few years, he and Peggy continued to date and Steve swore that he fell in love with her a little more each day. He fell in love with the way she pinned her hair back, the way she dogeared the pages of her books, the way her nose scrunched up as she laughed at one of his jokes that he swore she was the only one who ever found funny. And somewhere, deep in his bones, he knew that she loved him too. He could feel it every time she looked at him and gave him that smile of hers. She would reach out a hand to rest it against his cheek, the touch so intimate it felt like they were the only two in the world, and every ounce of the gesture made Steve’s heart soar. She just gave him that feeling…that she was supposed to be a big part of his life and change him in ways he didn’t even know yet, and he was so excited to see what was to come.
Then…things shifted. Not drastically, but it was like everything had been moved one inch to the left and even though nothing looked different, there was a feeling something was off.
It started when Peggy began to get headaches. She would get home from classes and there would be a set to her mouth that made Steve pause. He’d fuss over her until she waved him away, saying that there wasn’t anything wrong and all she needed was a couple painkillers. She would take two, go to her room to rest for a while, and then she’d meet him in the living room a few hours later with her arms wrapping around his neck from behind the couch, her mood completely changed. He tried to brush off the feeling in his stomach that something wasn’t right, even though sometimes it was all he could think about when she ran her hands down his shirt. Soon the two painkillers she took every once in awhile became a two painkillers daily, and then two turned into four and Steve could no longer ignore the worry gnawing at him from the inside out.
He finally put his foot down when he woke up in the early hours of the morning to the sounds of someone vomiting. He had reached out to hold Peggy to him and startled awake when all his hand grasped was the sheets of their bed, cold from lack of body heat. A violent gargle ripped through the quiet of their apartment and like a shot, Steve ran into the bathroom, his body turning to ice when he saw Peggy barely holding her head over the toilet bowl, the remnants of her dinner trailing down her chin and onto the shirt of his she loved to wear to sleep. He begged her to go see a doctor, even if it was just to ease his worry, and she reluctantly agreed, making an appointment for sometime in the coming week.
He wanted to wait until he knew for certain she felt better, but Steve found himself inside a jewelry shop a couple mornings later with his eyes trained on the shiny engagement rings twinkling from inside their glass enclosure. He’d saved up enough money from Christmases, birthdays, and his internship the past year to finally purchase the perfect ring for Peggy. It wasn’t flashy, the diamond small and in a classic princess cut, but it was beautiful and elegant and so like Peggy it made Steve’s heart burst just by looking at it. He paid the jeweler and couldn’t help the little skip in his step that followed him around for the rest of the day. Feeling that little black box in his pocket was enough to get him through a particularly difficult traffic jam, and the whole ride back to their apartment, the only thing he could think of was how Peggy’s face would light up when he asked her to marry him. He and Peggy were going to get married. Steve had let out a giddy little laugh at the thought as he pulled into their lot, parking the car a little more hurriedly than normal. He never really thought he’d ever get married and much less to someone like Peggy, who he still believed was way too good for him in every way possible. Steve took the steps up to their floor two by two until he finally stood in front of it, his keys jingling nervously in his hand before he finally said ‘fuck it’ and unlocked the door. It was now or never, and he couldn’t have waited another second.
That’s when he heard the crying.
And he knew.
Oh, he fucking knew.
He didn’t want to go into the kitchen, to follow the sounds of sniffles and muffled sobs, but his feet seemed to carry him there of their own will. It seemed he was watching the scene in slow motion as he came upon Peggy hunched over the small kitchen table set up by the window, her body facing away from him so that all he could really see was the shaking of her shoulders and the small wet spots that dotted the wood beneath her elbows. He stood there in the doorway for who knows how long, trying to collect himself before he made the first dive into uncharted waters, and he watched her try to contain her tears within herself as if she was an unbreakable dam. He could only take it for so long before he spoke, her name falling off of his lips like a prayer.
She’d whipped her head around to look at him, mascara streaking her cheeks, and tried in vain to wipe the evidence of her pain away as Steve made his way over to her. He hadn’t said anything, not wanting to hurt her further and selfishly not wanting to know, and just dropped to his knees before her. A solemn man kneeling at the feet of his saving grace, his head falling into her lap in a silent plea for mercy. And with her silence, she gave it to him.
The doctors diagnosed Peggy with a brain tumor. Malignant and aggressive. It had already progressed to a point that if they were to even try removing it, the risks of the surgery outweighed the cost of her life, and Steve wanted to punch every single one of the doctors in their perfectly impassive faces. He knew it wasn’t their fault, but just hearing them fit the rest of Peggy’s life into six months was enough to make him scratch out his eyes. They sat through meet after meeting with specialists who told them the same thing, all with the same fucking apologetic look on their faces; there’s nothing more that we can do. What hurt the most was how Peggy would smile back at them, nodding her head while thanking them for their time and saying that she understood.
They didn’t know how much she cried after they were out of earshot.
Steve stuck by her side every single day throughout those next six months. She kept trying to tell him that things were going to get worse, that she wasn’t going to be herself towards the end. She didn’t want him to be around for that, and even though it made his stomach turn over at the thought of Peggy not being…Peggy… he stayed.
It started off with just an increase in her headaches and vomiting, stuff that Steve could handle though it still pained him to watch. He had a stupid,stupid thought that maybe that would be the worst of it, and that everything leading up to the end would be a slow decline from that point. But that was before the memory loss. She only forgot little things at first, like where she had put the tv remote and what she had eaten for breakfast that morning, but when the point came to where she asked him what his last name was… a knot in his stomach began to grow. The mood swings kicked in shortly after that, mostly starting due to the fact of her being frustrated with what she couldn’t remember. She would be alright one moment, and then just a few minutes later would be crying and yelling about finding where she put her goddamn car keys, even though she hadn’t been driving in weeks. One particularly awful night, Steve came into their room after taking a shower to find Peggy on the floor, sobbing and beating her fists against her head as she screamed about not being able to remember what Steve had looked like in those few minutes he was gone. He spent the rest of the night trying to console her until he just ended up holding her so tightly in the hope that he could somehow take the pain away from her and bear it instead. It fucking broke Steve’s heart to watch her deteriorate before his eyes and know that somewhere inside Peggy, she knew what was happening to her. Yet, all either of them could do was watch as it tore her to pieces.
Most of the memories of that time were violent and agonizing, but the most vivid of them all was an evening when Steve had returned from the store to see Peggy out of bed and cooking at the stove. It was only spaghetti, the sauce a simple recipe from his ma’s cookbook, but the sight of her doing something remotely normal was enough to brighten Steve’s whole week. He’d approached her quietly in the fear of this being a trick of his mind, but when she turned to him and gave him that smile…she was his Peggy again. That meal was the best Steve felt he’d eaten in his entire life, and the rest of the night was blissfully free of any tumor related incidents, him and Peggy cuddling on the couch until they eventually made their way to the bedroom. Steve wanted to make love to her like he’d done a million times before everything had gone to shit, but it was more than enough for him just to lie next to her and feel her strong, even breathing fall into match with his. They laid there, Peggy held gently in Steve’s arms and they were almost asleep when she leaned in to whisper against his lips, “I love you…”
With a smile, he kissed her and answered her for the first time in six goddamn months with absolutely no sadness in his voice, “I love you, too.”
He’d fallen asleep with the echo of her voice in his ears, sleeping peacefully through the night, and when he woke, he was relieved to see that she was still in his embrace. Steve had smiled softly down her and reached out a hand to stroke her cheek, a gesture he knew she adored to wake up to. His fingertips brushed her face…but paused when the skin underneath them was cold. He shook her gently, saying her name with a twinge of hope attached to the end. A question.
She didn’t answer.
Everything that happened next Steve remembered in a blur. He remembered a feeling of white hot panic as he frantically tried to wake Peggy to no avail, screaming her name so loudly that he swore the room crumbled around them. He must’ve called 911 at some point, or someone else had, because there was a moment of Peggy being taken away from him and he remembered not wanting to let go, as morbid as that was. Holding onto a dead body for dear life. What a goddamn oxymoron. He remembered the funeral not feeling real and holding Mrs.Carter’s hand as her daughter’s body was lowered into the ground. At least God, or whoever the hell was in charge up there, had allowed it to rain that day. It was as if the whole world were weeping for the loss of Peggy and it made Steve feel less alone.
Steve went ahead and finished his senior year at OSU, plowing through his studies and using them as a distraction from how broken he actually was. There were people who still gave him pitying looks and professors that offered to give him extended deadlines on projects that he told them he was fully capable of finishing on time, but Steve patched up each encounter with a new band-aid and went about his life. He graduated, told his parents he wanted to move away from Ohio, and packed his bags for New York City. He knew it was a rash decision and that he didn’t have much of a plan formulated, but all he knew was that he had to get away from…everything.
The night before he left, Peggy’s parents showed up unexpectedly on Steve’s doorstep, their faces lightening and saddening at the same time as they took in Steve standing there. Guilt immediately punched Steve in the stomach at the thought that it was the first time he’d seen them since Peggy’s funeral. To be fair, he hadn’t seen much of anyone since the funeral, but Peggy’s parents had been like family to him and the guilt only grew as he realized that they were hurting just as much as he still was. Nobody spoke for a few seconds, a moment frozen in time that in another era would be filled with smiles and laughter but was now replaced with the painful silence one’s absence brings.
Mrs.Carter was the first to move, pulling Steve into a hug so tight it almost managed to push all of his broken pieces back into place, and it took every ounce of his strength not to bury his face in her shoulder and cry. It was even harder to look Mrs.Carter in the face because… shit, she looked so much like Peggy that Steve’s heart could barely take any eye contact for more than five seconds. They exchanged a few pleasantries and the conversation didn’t progress much beyond “how are you doing?” and “just fine, how are you?”. Steve hated that he felt awkward around them, but no matter how hard the Steve of months past screamed against the cages of his chest, only the dull voice of a man long dead escaped his lips. It wasn’t long before they ran out of things to talk about, and Steve could feel the conversation winding down like the slow static of a record player. They bid their goodbyes, with Steve walking them politely to the end of his apartment building’s steps, and the Carters filed into their car as Steve stood by with his shoulders hunched forward a bit in shame. He wanted to do something, something to show that he cared, but soon enough, Mrs. Carter’s hand came reaching for him out of the car window and latched onto his forearm with a firm grip. It was enough to make Steve’s head whip up in warning with the expectation of an angry woman, but instead he was greeted with a warm smile and a parting phrase.
“Please call us if you need anything, love. Even if it’s just to talk.”
Steve had never called.
Not even after he had learned they moved to New York.
And especially not after he’d gone without visiting Peggy’s grave since the funeral.
Steve couldn’t decide what kind of man that made him.