To spy my shadow in the sun;

[grimvisaged]

Rogers is not as good at this game as Romanoff. He is a man who lives the whole of his life in the open and has little knowledge of shadows, little use for subterfuge. Sometimes, his attention will find the right spot a moment too late. More often, Rogers doesn't know to look at all.

This should not be admirable, yet it is.

Nearly three weeks he's been trailing Rogers, quietly watching him, trying to find the footing he so thoroughly lost in Washington. He's less secure than he wants to be, the very sight of the man a perpetual punch to the gut, but curiosity eats at him, fed by an emotion beneath that he can't give a name to.

(lovelovelovelove)

In the long, late afternoon shadows of the gardens, he waits. Watches the figure jog through stands of trees, hurdling effortlessly over bushes, a distant smear of white on green growing rapidly closer. Predictable. Easily avoided.

This isn't how he intended this to go. He hadn't intended anything at all. Yet his right hand pulls the hood down from the stringy mess of his hair, and he takes one deliberate step from behind the pale and spindly trunk of a birch. Not line of sight, just on the periphery.

It'll be enough.

He doesn't realize he's holding his breath.

Comments

[grimvisaged]

He wants to snap again that he isn't Barnes, wants to tell Rogers to stop using you when he should mean he, but for all that he was made as a weapon, he can see when a fight will be fruitless. It bothers him beyond accounting, how dogged Rogers is about this even now.

In every word, every movement, those blue eyes see only Bucky Barnes.

"I didn't pull you from the Potomac because of him," he says now instead, veering the conversation right back in the direction he'd so adamantly diverted it from with his bullshit posturing about Austria. He isn't sharp or threatening now, but he means it deeply and his eyes are intense when they suddenly lock on Rogers. "That was me, not him. I made that choice."

He doesn't know why it matters now, only that it's everything. He hadn't understood that before.

[captain_rogers]

Steve gets the impression of a stray animal, looking at the man who was once and forever his friend. Though it’s better than the images before of a wild animal backed into a corner, of a man who had been hollowed out and filled with lead and purpose, of fear and of hate in familiar eyes framed in back, it’s one he cannot deny all the same. He doesn’t need to ask to know he’s fumbling every inch of them. He’s reminded too much of the animals they had seen in the war, ribs protruding from their thin sides, eyes too bright and wary even as they approached and retreated repeatedly from any attempt to help them, even so much as sharing shreds of their rations.

His world had been too emptied of Bucky to be able to hide the edge of desperation that brittled his voice, his body steeled in place in fighting the urge to reach out and be able to curl his fingers at Bucky’s shoulders once more.

The man who was at once Bucky and not Bucky spoke and Steve had to work not to flinch. Not for the defiant sharpness of his eyes or the pronouncement that he had made the first choice he had been capable of perhaps since the moment Steve had lost him in Switzerland. For the second time in his life he had fallen, untethered that second time from a ship or a reason to be lost. For the second time he had tasted defeat and accepted in the last moments before consciousness had slipped away, long before he hit the water, the certainty of his own death.

He had not expected to wake a second time.

The memory bled sluggishly from him, a wound still scabbing over, and he was left looking ahead at the man who had dragged him out of the river. “I understand,” he said, instead of all that roiled within him. “I-” he broke off before starting again, "I'm glad."

[grimvisaged]

Four words. That's apparently all it takes, and some hastily-buried part of him ignites with relief and what he thinks must be happiness. Without even realizing it, he'd been harboring a childlike desperation for this man's approval, and those four words, even grudgingly-given, grip him so suddenly that his hands shake where they're clamped at his sides.

What assaults him then are more impressions than actual memories: Blurred snapshots of straw-colored hair; of pale, earnest eyes; of stick-skinny limbs dangling off of fire escapes. Beneath it all there is an emotion so immovable, so undeniable, that the shock of finding it within himself makes him falter backward half a step with a visible wince.

(NO, NOT WITHOUT YOU!)

It's entirely too much.

Stunned, he looks to Rogers again, only to find that it hurts in a way he is completely unequipped to quantify. He will never be that man again, and all at once, it feels as if it's killing him.

Knowing no other way to respond, he does the only thing he can: He turns, wordless, and walks away.