Work Text:
You see the world in colors.
You see love and hate, sickness and anger, tiredness. You see everything.
The vibrant yellow of your mother's hair aging to a tired gray. The sad blue of her when you mention your father.
You see the black decay of people rotting inside; poor and broken littering the street. The gray nothing of people who hurt to look at but there's something inexplicably sad about them.
The bright red of your own love and his matching it. The way he looked sick and tired.
Hearts broken purple like a bruise. White innocence shining out of people and inevitably draining away.
The anxious fluttering orange of nerves and the way he looks when you leave him.
He's still red.
---
You never kiss him, even when he is bright red and there for the taking because you’ve never been good at distinguishing between the different kind of loves. You never touched the sharp of his cheekbones, or kissed his freckles, or his scars. You cleaned him up after fights that he started and you ended, and you throw your arm around him but that’s all you let yourself do.
You see people mistake his stature for fragileness, not seeing his strength. You can’t help but be selfishly thankful. That you get to keep your bird-boned, blue eyed boy to yourself.
You know what he looks like bruised and bloody, shocking against his pale skin, and you know what rage feels like as intimately as you know what it looks like.
You go to war without ever knowing what the pulse pulse pulse of his irregular heartbeat tastes like under your lips.
War is death and blood, black oozing over red and the shock of colors you could never process exploding in the background. Hearts broken and shattered the same way limbs are. Friends dying in front of you.
You see life and color seeping out of people, you see the blankness of shock. But you still fall in love.
You fall in love with war the same way you fell in love with him -- in denial. There’s blood and misery and violence and you are tired even before you’re taken away and strapped to a table.
You are screamscreamscreaming and everything is grey and you think you understand now. There is the glint of the knife, and the color of madness in the doctor’s eyes. You wonder what color you are when they inject you and inject you and inject you and you think you’re burning up inside out and all you can think is Steve.
You see him again and you think God has answered prayers you didn’t even know you had in you, but it’s all wrong. He was never supposed to be in war, he was never supposed to be touched directly by it. He’s too big to be your Steve.
---
You knew you were no good from the moment you woke up and looked at him and wanted more than you deserved, or would ever get. You have ‘sinner’ branded across your forehead and even that doesn’t stop you from wanting. The world is bright but not nearly as bright as him, and you can’t look away, even when it hurts.
You are many things but you aren’t stupid, you know that he will never love you back the same way, and it’s not like you don’t like girls. They just aren’t Steve. So you fall into them, into their wax stained lips, and soft hair, and curves that fit under your hands as easily as Steve does.
You look at the yellows and purples of the world, trying so hard not to be overshadowed by the gray and black filling the universe. You look at envy that isn’t green, and determination that shines out of your boy as brightly as your love for him does.
When you are knee deep in mud, exhausted down to the bones, and up to the tips of your fingers, and all you can see is death and destruction - you think of him, and the way he shines so bright. You think of him when they are marching you god knows where, and you’ve just seen men too wounded to walk shot coldly in the head. You have never been happier that Steve isn’t in war.
You think of that when they are cutting into you, and you think of that when you see him, but not him, rescuing you.
---
You see blonde hair shining through a hail of fists and a tiny body that wouldn’t stay down, and you think that’s when you first fell in love, not that you knew it at the time. You don’t normally interrupt what goes on in the back alleys (be it fights, or wrestling that looks like it’s the good kind of hurt) but you do this time, and you don’t know why but you are forever thankful that you did.
You learn the color of gratitude, determination, and hope all mixed together, and you learn what your mom looks like when you come home with a boy with bruised eyes, and bloodied everything.
His name is Steve, and yours is James (but call me Bucky), and you learn to love the way his lips form the word. You get into more fights than you ever imagined, and you treasure the openness of his face, the twitch of his mouth, and wrinkle between his eyes.
You grow and he doesn’t, but you still manage to look up to him.
---
There’s a man beside you but he is not your friend, he is not your Steve. He shines the same red, he has the same face, but he is not your Steve. He is not only your Steve anymore, and you can’t help but think that all you’ve ever been good at is being his friend, now what use are you? You march march march next to him, tired and feeling blinded by the lack of colors, but something is telling you that you can keep going. That the tired you feel isn’t physical, and you suppose, the least you can do is keep up with Steve.
You think you say, “Let’s hear it for Captain America!” but all you can remember is thinking; how am I going to protect him now.
---
He’s the first color you see, the first thing that looks right after everything, and you can’t help but feel that that’s fitting. You’ve never been more in love than when you say, “That little guy from Brooklyn who was too dumb not to run away from a fight, I’m following him.”
You didn’t know Steve wasn’t happy until you saw him happy, and you hate yourself for being jealous anyway. She is beautiful and smart, and sharper than you could ever dream of being, and in a way you’re happy for him, he finally got the girl you were always trying to find him. Only he did it without you.
You fall and you don't know if you let go or if he did or if you were never holding onto each other to begin with. All you know is cold and ice and snow, and pain pain pain. You fight back as much as you can when you see Zola, but you are tired and broken and you know like you know what color desire is that Steve isn’t coming back for you.
When you wake up, cold and frozen, everything is grey. You think that’s fitting.
You thought you knew cold, knew it from long hard winters with no heat and too little money, thought you knew it from the way it made Steve’s lips and fingers blue, and no matter how tightly you wrapped around him he wouldn’t (couldn’t) warm up. But you didn’t, you didn’t know cold until it seeped into you and never left.
You don’t remember much, just flashes here and there, but you remember pain, and how you couldn’t feel the men die under your metal arm. White warps into grey, snow into blood under you and on you, and all around. You can’t escape it anymore.
You forget him eventually. You forget yourself first.
---
You never felt quite right in your skin but all you are is the asset so what does that matter. You don’t know how many people you've killed (the grayness all over her pretty pink suit, the man with a moustache that said he knew you) and you don't care (assets -- machines don't care -- and that’s what you are). You follow orders and try not to scream when the cold claws at you.
You don’t know who you are or how old you are when the girl (nothing more than a child really) with the bright red hair comes and goes but you remember her for the longest time. (Until they take that away from you too.)
There’s a man on the bridge who you know (knew?). He’s too big and too small all at once to be your blue-eyed bird boned boy.
You don’t have a name, you are a weapon, a tool, a means to an end, but something in you splinters and cracks when he says that name.
Who the hell is Bucky?
When he backs down, never taking his eyes off of you, you don’t know what or why but something feels wrong. You know, like you know the sky is blue, and you are nothing more than a weapon, that this man doesn’t back down.
You tell them you knew that man but all they do is say he’s your assignment and shove you back
and you know this act, you know these lines, so you bite down and wait until all you can taste is the rubber in your mouth and the burn in your head.
The world is grey but he is bright and it hurts to look at him. Your fist connects like a bullet and you scream through how much it hurts. Your world stops when you hear, “I’m with you ‘till the end of the line.” He falls and you follow, and that feels right in a way you haven’t felt in longer than you can remember.
You drag him out of the lake and don’t leave him to die, and that haunts you more than anything else you’ve ever done, more than watching blood trickle out of the forehead of a child.
He goes looking for you, and you do too. You don’t know who you are, or who you were, but there is a man in the museum with the same face as you.
Before you let him find you, you try to put yourself together again. Find all the pieces you didn’t know were missing and shove them together until they fit. You forget to eat, and sleep a lot. Time passes you in leaps and crawls, between fits of remembering and not remembering.
You do let him find you, where he finds you isn’t important, what is, is how he looked when he saw you.
---
The bed he gives you is too soft, so you sleep on the floor instead. The look on his face when he sees what you’ve done you feel more than you’ve felt in seventy years. You don’t know how to tell him you aren’t the man he’s looking for, that you have killed, that you aren’t worth the space you take up, that you-
You are not the man he sees when he looks at you.
You are unhallowed temptation simmering just beneath your skin, and you are no longer Bucky. You think you haven’t been for awhile. You are no longer jerk, or the boy who deserved the smile on that blue-eyed boys face.
You are weapon, you are monster, and you are machine. But you are not his.
You don’t know how old you are, and you don’t really care anymore, but everything you cared about is still here, and you feel like a monster because everything he cared about is dead and gone.
You are jerk and he is punk, or at least you used to be. You don’t know what you are anymore, at least you don’t know what you are to him. To everyone else, you are machine and monster in one, you can see it in their eyes when their mouths lie.
There is blood on your hands, and in your mouth and pumping through your veins, and you don’t know what is yours and what isn’t anymore. You want to press your bloodstained lips against his, you have for a long time, and you know you never will.
Your memories taste like burnt ash and death and you want to scratch and claw it out of you but you’d settle for a gun.
---
The first time you look at him and see red it’s like coming home.
---
You are tar that has latched onto him and will never let go, not for as long as you live. You ruin him, ruin his goodness, you are the dark smudge to match his light. You wish you cared enough to leave.
It is 4am and you have been up for days on end, everything is beginning to blur and you feel like you’re clawing at nothing to get back into a body that never feels like it fits; skin stretched too thin to cover who you really are. The cold used to grab you before you could do much more than remember falling. Spots dance around the edges of your vision; you think there might be a party dancing in your shadows and you are so tired your bones ache with it.
You entertain thoughts of ripping your heart out and giving it to a man who will never want it back quite the same way you want.
He loves you and you think that’s almost the worst part, because he does love you. Just not the way you want him to.
Sometimes you look at him and wonder how the world that created you could create him.
You look at him and you can taste your desire on the back of your tongue but you can’t remember if you ever felt this way before, sometimes you look at him and you just know. There’s no way you could exist and not want everything he’s willing to give you and more.
And you think, yeah that’s only fair.
That's only fair.