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Steve’s eyes reflected the informational film being projected onto the screen in front of him. Images and footage from the war flashed across the wall as a rich voiced man offered narration regarding the “heroic patriot”, Captain America, in a way Steve couldn’t quite stomach. He, of course, was no stranger to this particular film, having seen it more times than he’d care to admit.
The Smithsonian had put together the exhibit in his honor shortly after the announcement was made that he had been retrieved from the ice. Fury had suggested he visit it, that it might help him “come to terms with things” and “Get caught up”. The first time he went, he didn’t disguise himself well enough and was recognized by several star struck young boys who, luckily for Steve, had not made a scene.
He walked through the hall of strategically placed displays, a familiar sense of morose nostalgia settling in his gut. Around him, printed in a quality he had never known prior to the war, was a larger than life photograph of his best friend. The first time he saw it, his breath hitched and he had to fight the burning sensation building behind his eyes. His hand moved up slowly to touch the cold glass. That was his Bucky, lost and now only an image in a museum, only one among the many ghosts that linger in the facility, unknown and not cared for by any aside from Steve.
He wanted to correct the people he shared the space with, the ones that whispered things that hurt his heart. He wanted to make a public announcement that he didn’t deserve the all the praise, that Bucky Barnes was the reason he made it for as long and as far as he did, that he was his muse in more ways than one, and that he was the reason he was still living. Instead he roamed the building almost wishing he could sink into the walls and be with Bucky, out of this crazy world he woke up in and back with the only person that could make things better.
If Steve were to be honest, which in cases like this he typically wasn’t, he was still numb by the death of his friend. He wakes up at all hours of the night, his heart threatening to jump from its place behind his ribs, and a nervous sweat coating him like a quilt. He often relives that day on the train; the fight, the struggle, the fall. The sound of Bucky’s screams as he approaches his end still ring through his ears long after his eyes open. He is forced to revisit the feeling of that one, constant, vital piece of himself being violently yanked away from him too soon.
Steve remembers the feeling from when his mother passed. The realization that something that he cared about was gone forever, damned to only ever live on in his memory, never to touch or to hold or to cry on again. He can still remember Bucky’s warmth, on cold winter nights when their Brooklyn apartment was too expensive to heat and so they were forced to used one another as thermoses. He remembers the feeling of Bucky’s callused hand in his own as he worked to comfort Steve on what Bucky feared would be his death bed. He could still recall the musty smell of metal and oil Bucky wore when he got back from working the yard. Those were things that were lost on the still frame photo of his friend. The things that, unlike his chiseled jaw and piercing eyes, could not be recreated by paint and a machine, and that no one else will have the fortune of knowing.