Creative Writing: The Winter Soldier

He was alive. Steve remembered when that was his mantra during that first suicide mission to recover the 107th. Bucky was alive. As Steve lay in the hospital bed recovering from his injuries, that thought bounces around in his mind. Why hadn’t he looked for him? How could he have let his body rot in that ravine without at least looking for him? Why hadn’t he done something? He had been so sure that he would know when Bucky died, that he would feel it, yet all these years he had been alive and Steve hadn’t known. It didn’t matter that he had been under ice for a good portion, it should have never gotten to that point. How could he have left Bucky in that ravine? Steve didn’t know what he would have done if Sam wasn’t there. Sam never pressured
him to talk or pry into his past. He just listened when Steve spoke and filled up the silence when he didn’t, either with his own stories or all the music Steve had missed. For a man that had only known Steve a couple of days before the fight in D.C., he understood him in a way that Steve was starting to think no one would again. Sam kept Steve’s self-hatred and guilt at bay, not by praising Steve or sugarcoating the truth, but by reminding Steve that he was human. He might be Captain America, but he was also a man, and a complete idiot sometimes if you believed Sam’s telling of events. Sam was probably right about that. It didn’t help the nightmares, having Sam around, but at least most of the time he didn’t wake up alone. Steve starts to sleep during the day so that Sam is there when he wakes up. He can’t stand to be alone with his thoughts, especially after the dreams. As his wounds started to heal, Steve found himself being restless, but still not able to do anything. Finally, he asks Sam for a notebook or a drawing pad. He tries to draw Bucky from memory, but he finds that he can’t get past the line sketches. They never capture him the way that Steve saw him. They seem so flat, so dead, and that wasn’t Bucky. Also, they take on the quality of Bucky on the helicarrier, an assassin, dark, cold, which weren’t Bucky either. After quite a few failed attempts, Steve finds himself drawing a labrador. Not the comic that he used to draw, but an actual dog. He starts to get into it, dressing in Bucky’s sniper gear. When Steve finishes the picture, he just stares at it for a while. Sam praises it, as do all the nurses who see it, saying it is lovely. Steve doesn’t think it’s lovely, it makes him sick. He rips it out of his notebook, tears it to shreds, and throws it out. He doesn’t need a picture of a stupid dog. He needed Bucky. He was going to find him or die trying.
*
“You remember those stupid comics that we used to draw?” Steve doesn’t know why he asks. Out of all the things he wants to say to Bucky, he wants to understand, he wants to fix, he asks about those stupid drawings. This was one of the first moments they had alone, they were flying toward almost certain death, and he was asking about doodles. Bucky was quiet in the back.
He had been speaking for most of the trip, telling Steve everything he had done. Every assassination, every mission, every legend that made the Winter Soldier so feared. However, he wasn’t the Winter Soldier anymore, and his voice shook as he described the men and women he killed, the things he did. He barely got through explaining the assassination of Howard Stark, because Bucky had known him, knew that he was a friend of Steve’s. That was nothing compared to him explaining chocking Maria to death. The pain in his voice made Steve want to tell him to stop, to make Bucky believe that it wasn’t him doing those things, but Steve knew what it was like to need to exorcise your demons. Peggy had listened to him so many times, taking some of the burden off of him by just listening. Now he had to be that for Bucky because there was nothing else he could do.
At the thought of Peggy, Steve felt another stab of pain. She had lived a long life, but he selfishly hadn’t wanted to let her go. He needed something to anchor him to who he was, to remind him of the Steve that was just a mutt on Brooklyn’s streets. If she was still alive, would he have fought so hard to keep Bucky with him? Would he have done all of this differently? Would she had helped him figure out what to do? Would he still have Tony at his back and his friends not in prison? Somehow, he doubted it, but she would have helped him not to make such a mess of
everything. “I’ve been waiting for you to draw the next part,” came the voice from behind him. “I want to see what happens next.” Steve spins around in his seat to see that Bucky’s smiling at him. It’s not the smile he remembers, it is sad and broken, but it is a smile. This might not be the Bucky he remembered any more, but his Bucky was still in there, the boy from Brooklyn who followed him into the jaws of death. Steve realized that neither of them got out unscathed. “It was your turn to draw,” Steve smiled back before turning around. He heard a small huff from the back seat, but could feel Bucky’s smile even if he couldn’t see him. They could do this, they could put themselves back together. They could figure it out. They had each other, they could do anything.
*
Steve walks into the room that T’Challa gave him and sighs. He feels old and drained and alone. The weight of everything that has happened, everything that he has done, settles on his shoulders making it so that he has to sit down or be crushed. In the end, he lost Bucky again, though this time it was Bucky’s choice. They only had a few days together, most of it running, it wasn’t enough. Logically it made sense, protecting him from the corruption of Hydra, stopping him from doing things he didn’t want to do. Yet, Steve felt hallow and empty. He had lost Peggy and he had basically lost Buck. Hell, he had lost everything. Captain America was a fugitive, though he didn’t even think he was Captain America anymore. He didn’t know who he was. He flopped down onto the bed, closing his eyes and sighing. Rolling onto his side, something crinkles under his pillow when he moved his head. Steve slipped his hand underneath and touches paper, paper that had not been there before. Sitting back up, he extracts the pages and flips them open. There are five of them, broken into boxes, detailing the adventures of a lab in a military uniform and a mutt in Captain America’s uniform. They are crud drawings, being done with Bucky’s left hand now that his right was gone. As Steve’s eyes traveled from box to box he watched as they two fought side by side and defeated their enemy, the cat, with the help of a new doodle, a pigeon. That could only be one person. At the bottom of the fifth page, the dogs and the pigeon were all standing to with their backs to the viewer, looking at the sunset, three little words scribbled into the bottom of the corner. Carefully, Steve set the papers on the bed and looked at the floor. He was smiling, but tears were rolling down his cheeks. It seemed like a fitting end to the story after all these years. How long had the lab and the mutt been fighting against the cats? How many forms had the cats taken? How did that no longer fit since the person that was harboring them personified a cat? That fight was over, whether they had won or not was still to be decided. Steve wiped his eyes and got up, turning on the light over the desk in the room. He grabbed a notebook that had been left there for him and flipped to a clean page, smoothing it out with his fingers as he thought. The hollowness inside him was slowly filling with something else. Something warm and uplifting and bright. It wasn’t completely erasing the pain and the ache, nothing would, but it was there to ease it just a bit. Putting the pencil to the paper, Steve divided the paper into boxes, careful that the lines were straight. He knew who he was, who he has always been. A lab and a mutt took shape as the pencil floated across the page, A little older, a little more beat up, but still the same. They were in different clothes, but still the same characters, the same doodles that had started all those years ago when Bucky first wrote to him. As the night grew dark outside Steve continued to draw, his head full of ideas, and his heart full of hope. Those three words that Bucky had written at the bottom ringing in his head, bringing a smile to his lips. To Be Continued