Disclaimer: I own nothing
Author's Note: A drabble - Steve falls. Life flashes before his eyes, in a way. Written at 3am while listening to Arcade Fire (the title of this fic comes from their song 'Afterlife') and sobbing over all the feels I have for Stucky. Shameless feels'fest. Fits into my Stucky series before "you belong with me, not swallowed in the sea."
it's just an afterlife with you
Steve falls.
There's symmetry there that he recognises; a train in Germany, his heart thundering in his ears, a scream. Bucky. His back hits the Potomac with a crack like concrete splitting, and all he can feel is pain and cold and the water pushing in on him. All he can see is the green dark, the water stinging at his eyes as he blinks into it. And it's over and he's glad. He's done his job one last time, and he didn't have to kill the stranger – friendloveBucky – who means everything to him in the doing of it, and that is enough.
This is the end of the line.
Steve sinks under and he thinks of veiled truths in the touch of Bucky's wrist to his fevered forehead, the fierce protection in back alleys, the lopsided smiles over breakfast. He thinks of unspoken denials and their keen outward interest in girls, all tangled contradictory with the way they had slept curled up in one bed together after they got their own place. Sharing body heat, they had said the first winter they lived together, and by the time the sticky swelter of July rolled around, the excuse was that they were used to it.
And yeah, Steve had been used to it. Bucky's breath tingling warm on the back of his neck, his fingers creeping in sleep to curl over Steve's skinny hip as they slept like separated spoons. The heat melting over them; the smell of sweat and mentholated oil and shaving soap that permeated their sheets. The weak breeze wisping in their one window. The fragile sense of contentment that Steve had gotten from lying there with Bucky's hand on his hip, a comfortin the suffocating humidity that made breathing an effort.
It's cold. The water is cold and it rushes up Steve's nose, and his lungs are burning with the strain of not taking a breath of the dark waters. He blinks up at the fading yellow-green of daylight through the water, and –theendoftheline – gulps for air because this is it. Steve tastes murk in his mouth, aspirates water, and it fills him. Pain in his chest, and in his stomach, his side – pain radiating through him dull and throbbing from all his many wounds. He is heavy like a stone. He sinks like a stone in the Potomac, down toward the river bed and death, and it hurts but it's okay.
Bucky had gone away to war with a grin and a casual saunter, and Steve had followed as fast as he could.
But he'd never caught up, Steve has realised, now as the water swallows him up. Because Bucky went away to war but the man Steve found in Zola's laboratory was Sergeant Barnes. Not the Bucky who Steve shared cotton candy with at Coney Island, who beat the snot out of bullies in back allies, and yanked girls' neat braids with a casual kind of interest, and scuffed his laughing way down Brooklyn streets beside Steve with his hands shoved in his pockets and his grin wide and bright enough to blind the sun.
Not the Bucky who left school at fourteen and went to work odd jobs down at the docks, whose ma was furious at first and clipped him around the ears for wasting his life. Bucky said with a shrug that school bored him, only everyone who knew them, knew for a fact that he'd done it for Steve. To pay for Steve's sketch pads and pencils, and good food to keep him healthy, and the asthma medicine he needed, because Steve's ma had contracted TB and couldn't work enough anymore. And Bucky's ma had looked at her son's sun-wide grin and the protective arm he slung around Steve's skinny shoulders, and the adoration that lit up Steve's too-thin face, and had held her tongue.
Steve had loved him in so many different ways.
That Bucky had died in the war long before he'd fallen from the train.
No one comes back from war, Steve thinks as his eyes slip shut against the weight of the darkening water, and his mind begins to tick down, slow and heavy and drowned. His body is numbed and useless pain; his limbs are leaden and his chest is waterlogged and he is drowning, he is dying. But Steve is really all right with that. When Bucky had fallen into that ravine, a piece of Steve had too, as corny as it sounds, and now the rest of him is following at last. When Bucky had fallen, the part of Steve that was still Steve Rogers the scrappy kid from Brooklyn, and not Captain America symbol of the nation, had gone dead and withered in his chest. He was left hollowed out and purposeless when he'd awoken in this new millennium, and he'd depended on S.H.I.E.L.D to give him that purpose. Only it had all been a lie. He thinks perhaps he should have known.
No one comes back from war. Not the same.
Nearly a century after Bucky Barnes went off to fight with a grin and a wave that hid his fear, the Winter Soldier has come back from the war. Only he carries it with him still, in Hydra commands and metal arms, and there is nothing left of James Buchanan Barnes there behind those sea foam eyes, except that he remembers Steve. He does; Steve clings to that fragile half truth and pretends, just as he lay in sweaty sheets in July and pretended Bucky's fingers on his hip could mean something more. And now there is brief, scorching life in Steve's chest, as the scrappy kid from Brooklyn thinks 'Bucky' and reaches out. One last, bright flare before the light is extinguished by inevitability and the murky waters of the Potomac, and all Steve can think is Bucky's name, over and over in a litany because why did everything have to come to this?
Steve has followed Bucky always. Always.
Bucky fell. Steve crashed. They slept through the decades together – Bucky in broken Winter Soldier nightmares, and Steve one long, dreamless coma. And now, here they are. Together again in another century – another millennium. It should be a miracle, only Bucky is a hollowed out husk and Steve is dying in the river depths, and it is all like some horrible cosmic joke that they have been preserved through the decades only to be torn apart again. Steve wishes things were different, as the Potomac strips him away to darkness and a fading whywhywhynoBuckyBuckyBucky.
Fading memories of summer afternoons in Brooklyn, sprawled in the shade on a fire escape, a dark-haired boy of twelve with a wicked smile sitting beside Steve, their shoulders bumped together as they share slices of ripe orange. And the juice slides down Steve's chin as he laughs at something Bucky says, and Bucky's eyes flash bright, and he swipes the heel of his hand over Steve's chin with a snort. "Ya mook," he laughs, all affection and teasing, scrubbing his sticky hand on his pants and grinning at Steve with a juice-gleaming mouth.
All of this is gone.
Gone to the cold and the ice and the decades of death, and the war that began it all, that tore them from Brooklyn and everything that they were there together. Everything they could have been.
Except then there is the cold clamp of a metal hand around Steve's wrist, and the jerking drag of upwards motion that wrenches at Steve's shoulder.
And everything goes black.
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