Prologue: Ready

Ready?

Ready.

Are you sure, cause when I beat you, you're really gonna be embarrassed.

Yeah, we'll see. Just go.

Alright, one-

Steve felt blood gushing, hot and thick, down his chin and into his mouth. He'd felt his nose snap the first time, and crunch painfully the second time.

-two-

His throat felt on fire, he could still feel Bucky's cold, metal fingers tightening like he was still holding on and it hurt even to breathe.

-three!-

Steve gripped Bucky's hand and began to push and tried not to be surprised at Bucky's incredible strength, both of their elbows down on the table, the small, mechanical sounds from Bucky's arm almost completely normal to both of them already. Bucky was very clearly trying not to let his grip become too much for Steve as they strained against each other and this only made Steve more determined to beat him, but he watched in shock as Bucky was moving his hand back slowly, slowly, and glanced up to catch the concentrated look on his face as the back of Steve's hand slapped the table and Bucky threw up his hands in victory.

"Yes!" Bucky cried. "See, what'd I tell you, Steve. You shouldn't have challenged me."

"Yeah, well let's go a round with your right and see what happens," Steve said, only half joking, and Bucky just grinned at him.

And all Steve could feel was the bruises of finger marks on his throat.

Now, it was nearing midnight and Bucky and Natasha were still out for the night and Steve felt something boiling up inside him, rising on the tide of his guilt and his loneliness and every dark emotion he told himself he didn't have the room, the right, the time to feel. He could feel everything inside him, a pressure he couldn't admit, pressing down a cap on top of every negative emotion he'd encountered. It hurt, Steve was realizing. A thick pain, like a dull knife in his side, like he didn't know how to be happy, like he couldn't talk about it now, couldn't talk about it then, and would never talk about it.

Steve sat in his apartment, alone again in front of a blank canvas, submerged in silence.

It wasn't, of course, that he didn't know what to paint. He had pictures in his head, a thousand images, a thousand emotions. But the problem was that he hated painting dark things. He didn't want images of war or blood, he couldn't draw another picture of Bucky on the bridge, or of freezing over in the dark, but that's all he had in his head.

He wanted to paint those things, he felt the need to put them down on the canvas, but he wouldn't let himself. Those pictures were too dark, too raw, and honestly, he didn't have a right to that pain. He just didn't. He had to be okay.

So instead, because Steve knew he needed the practice anyway, he always needed the practice, he drew up some image of Brooklyn, one he'd done a million times before in pencil, the cityscape and the tall buildings, and painted that instead.

It took silvers, and it took hot reds and yellows and pinks and a blue he just couldn't seem to mix right until finally, he just wanted to put it up and be done with it. He was tired, but he knew he was distracting himself with the paint. He couldn't stop now and risk facing whatever he was painting over and hiding from.

Cause that's what he was doing, of course. Painting over it all. And he'd never realized it so acutely until now and he wasn't sure how to feel about that.

Woosh, the tide of silence over top of him, suffocating him. And crackling, the fire guilt inside him, burning him alive. And Steve felt in an instant like he was dying.

It was dark and the quiet hurt in the same way that the aloneness did and Bucky still wouldn't be back for several hours and Steve just stared up at the ceiling and let out a shuddering breath and wished with a fierceness that he wasn't so alone.

This, Steve realized as he let his breath go, is going to be hard. And he hated himself for it.