Director's cut thingy: last chapter of i am an exit, particularly the fight between Bucky and Steve, and the resolve of that. And, if you like, the part where Bucky fantasizes about what could've been... thank you <3
The penultimate section. I'm copypasting it here. I don't feel that it's a "spoiler" since I had it written way, way ahead of time. I was consciously building towards these paragraphs most of the time I was writing the Buckyfic.
He thought of how it might have been. The other Steve, a skinny, frail boy with rosy cheeks and mouth, and the other Bucky, his face sparkling with laughter, lying together on the thin mattress. How they’d feel shy as they took off their clothes, glancing quickly with reddening faces at each other’s bodies. How they’d hesitate, all tangled with uncertainty and lust; how they’d blush over awkward curiosities, touch where they were tempted, guide each other’s hands to what felt good. How they’d make love until they were tired and nestle into the scent and warmth of bare skin. To sleep, to wake up again, together and alive and in love.
But instead, there was a war that consumed the bodies of men. There was an earth soiled with genocide. There was tuberculosis, and poverty, and whooping cough, and winter, and hunger, and death. There was instead a people of harsh and narrow hearts that ached to punish the tender love of one boy for another, a nation that killed what was weak and gentle and queer within itself. There was the draft card, there was the sanatorium, there was the silence.
Inside Bucky’s head, the two boys made love to one another, until the shadows of the things that were to come slanted over them, and their innocent embrace was buried by the dust of their cruel century.
I think this is what you mean by the "what could've been" section. To be clear I knew this was coming even though I had no idea what the actual events of the plot were going to be. This was the emotional culmination. The part where it's fully acknowledged and accepted that Steve and Bucky's love story is a tragedy.
It pairs with the part in their conversation earlier where Bucky says this:
“Bucky was dead from the very beginning, Steve,” Bucky said. “You shoulda told him you loved him.”
The whole story, up to this point, has been about the questions posed at the end of the summary I wrote for ao3:
Is the Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, or is he a thing wearing Bucky Barnes’s face? Which of those things is worse?
Throughout the story, Bucky is portrayed as an uncanny, undead creature. His existence drags the body of the spirited young man that Steve loved out of its grave to be soiled and mutilated. The Winter Soldier is a kind of Grim Reaper, a manifestation of death, and in many ways Bucky Barnes was the first person the Soldier killed.
Which is why Steve goes from devotion to the idea that the Soldier is Bucky even when everyone else thinks he's delusional, to denial. Chapter 8 ends with the shocking reveal that Steve not only no longer believes the Winter Soldier is Bucky, Steve hates him, even though he knows it's not the Soldier's fault, because he sees the Soldier as something deliberately created to pollute and desecrate Bucky's memory.
This awful idea wears off into Bucky's thoughts as well (In chapter 29, when Bucky is talking about his sexual abuse):
[...]I did that to him. To B-B-Bucky,” He was trembling. “He [Steve] shouldn’t f-forgive me for that.”
The same thought occurs back in chapter 18:
“It happened. Okay? And I'm sorry.”
Steve blinked, tilting his head. “What do you mean, you're sorry?”
“That I whored out your best friend to all of Hydra, I don't know! That I didn't let your Bucky die with some kinda dignity!”
Bucky feels like a creature puppeting The Real Bucky's dead body, which leads to him feeling like his own sexual victimization was something that he allowed to happen to, or even inflicted upon, Steve's dead friend.
GodDAMN that's fucked up. (And I love it!)
Steve learns Bucky’s true identity in chapter 12, which means there is (theoretically) not a lot of time devoted to this denial plot, but it is really carried through until the very end—Steve has a gut impulse that this is Not his friend (even panicking and flinching from him, referring to him as 'that thing' when he is delirious in chapter 16) and he continues to angst over whether it is appropriate to feel about Bucky the same way he felt about The Other Bucky.
This comes to a head in chapter 34, during the argument: Bucky says “I always wanted to do that [kiss you]” and Steve retorts, “How do you know what he would have wanted?”
Even if Steve knows and accepts that there is some continuity in the body and mind of current Bucky with the man he used to love, he doesn’t feel that the current Bucky has the right to define what pre-war Bucky wanted or felt. This is a callback to some of Steve’s dark thoughts in chapter 8: he still has this anxiety about the current Bucky overwriting “his” Bucky, polluting or corrupting his memories of the old Bucky.
And present Bucky can’t give Steve the assurance he wants. He simply doesn’t remember enough.
Steve has to let go of his fear that the Other Bucky will be contaminated. Accompanying that is an acceptance of the fact that, in many ways, their old selves are dead. The final, fourth act of the story parallels Steve's story with Bucky's, discussing how he was turned into a human weapon and how his old self, the self that was disabled and devalued by society, was killed. Steve's transformation is re-framed as an act of violence, in the same way that Bucky's transformation was.
They both died. They both Came Back Wrong. It was not possible for them to love each other in their time. Implicitly, without the horrifying transformations they both underwent, they both would have died before their time: Bucky as a POW, Steve due to tuberculosis or some other aspect of his failing health.
Furthermore, they never would have been able to tell each other that they loved each other. They would have died without confessing.
This penultimate section ties their tragedy to the violence of war and the cruelty at the heart of the United States of America. It follows that the resolution of the plot where Steve is in conflict with the USA government is that Steve gives our culture a chance to become less cruel. Bucky demonstrates that the philosophy of “order through pain” is false; Steve demonstrates that the concept of a strong, masculine, perfect ideal man who embodies and carries out violence is false. Both falsehoods are broken by love.
It doesn't even have to be romantic love, but I think it has to be a kind of queer love, thematically speaking, because queerness is a manifestation of what this cruelty is so antithetical towards. The cruelty inflicted upon boys to turn them into men and into soldiers. The rejection of all things soft and gentle and loving, the abhorrence towards the idea that a man's body could be FOR anything but violence and domination of other bodies.
It's a triumph but it's also a tragedy. They both have to mourn their own deaths. They only get a second chance because the incredible violence done to their bodies denied them rest in death.
