The soot is no longer touching the skies of Brooklyn, there is no sickening smell of burning in the air from the agitated consciousness of a mixture of engine oils and human bodies. Bucky insists that the war is over, but the sound of constant volleys are mockingly declaring to him quite the opposite.
“The War,” - says Steve, sitting down on the contrary - “will never end. I know it.”
Bucky says nothing in his words, he wanted to hear something different from him and yet here he is, wishing he would say something about posttraumatic syndrome and all that shit - he would’ve believed that easily, because you believe in his words even before he said them, but Steve with a drooping head just grins crookedly and he knows right then that he’s right. Outside the window burns free once Brooklyn and Baky cannot help it.
He’s just tired asking the same question over and over again. “What the hell?!” - aliens, gods, demonic creatures - “I’m only a human, God, I’m only a human”. He’s just tired watching Steve looking at that cheap phone, waiting for a day when Stark will call.
Guilt and regret are polarly different feelings. Bucky blames himself for the death of hundreds of thousands but doesn’t feel any guilt, remembering how he broke his knuckles against the details of the red-and-yellow suit. He is tired and the God knows, in whom he almost never believed in his hundred years, he would now return to cryogenic freezing in the arms of the bloody HYDRA, because here, now, he seems to be burning alive in the furnace; as if was, again and again, he falling into a fucking chasm away from a rushing freight car; as if lying there, torn to pieces in a pool of his own blood, watching the dawn break in the sky.
He’s not ready to comply. He’s tired of being afraid that someone might take control over him again. The war will never end, but the fact is that wars are also different. In the forty-fourth he didn’t feel guilty, pressing the trigger, he knew why he was doing it, he knew why he was doing it for. Not a bunch of stupid, incoherent, seemingly utter words, no electric current, which made the whole body beat in unbearable agony, or a hundred scientists who are about to die in the name of the damned creature - no one forced him to do it. He didn’t follow the guy in a ridiculous, stupid blue suit. He followed Steve. He went for the Motherland, where he once promised to return.
Seventeen shots before falling into the void. Nine attempts to tear off the hated metal from his own body, blindly believing that he is the culprit and the cause.
Forty years is an infinitesimal time and Bucky does not believe that in his place any other would have broken much earlier. Words - a heap of unnecessary, cheap and meaningless regrets for someone who is surrounded by the ghosts of people killed by them.
He’s not ready to comply. He is not ready to go out of sleep, saying goodbye to the calmness of the ice, in order to launch into another battle. “But the world,” - says Steve, putting the hand on his shoulder - “needs to be rescued.” And now Bucky has a completely new arm from the old, as it turned out, metal. And a full of self-disgust thought is running through his mind - he’s been repaired again. Just like the old times.
Good, fucking, morning, soldier.
He’s not ready to comply.
origamiaround
theartofmadeline
snowghoul
discoholicmusic
areudirty
