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There are times when he lights up bright the way he did back home, and these days aren’t ones you can stomach lightly because they don’t happen as often.
The way he looks at you right now for example, the way his face breaks open just slightly when he sees that you’re already looking, this hits your stomach harder than those oysters at the dive back home.
There’s something you’ve not told him. It’s running through those veins keeping you alive, flowing in the way you swing that sniper rifle over your shoulder and back again. He hasn’t noticed yet. There’s something bigger about him, beyond the physical; he’s turning into a legend right now before your eyes. You can see him already, slowly being entombed within the pages of a history book.
You’d be a line of text. Six words, if that. ‘Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, childhood friend’.
It’s amusing to you, that one day children with scraped and sweaty palms will read about the two of you. That was you too once.
You go to him where he stands, jaw kissed by the campfire. When you’re alone later you’ll trace the memory of the firelight and kiss him just there, where his pulse lovingly cedes blood to the pull of your lips.
‘Childhood friend’. That’s not what you’re thinking now, afterward. Not now that his uniform is crumpled up with yours on the floor of your tent. Maybe there will be a footnote, one they could never prove but could never rule out: ‘Rogers and Barnes may have had a romantic relationship’.
In the morning when his eyes are sleep softened and looking at you like you’ve hung the stars, you think about yelling into the future the truth of it. You think about saying, “It’s him and me and me and him, it has only ever been this.”
It would be worth it because he is bright like he used to be when he is around you. It is partly the fact of him and the fact of you loving him that makes his looks hurt so much.
But here, in the dewy morning light, regardless of the secrets knit into both your bones, it is this. You are lovesore and so is he and he is heavy on your stomach.
If it’s a book it’s one with worn edges. You are both of you tired and—no, not bruised; this will never happen for you again, will it, that your skin will keep cracked blood cells for long, even the mark on his neck is fading—tired and underlined somehow. Like your books from school.
You have thought this before, that this feeling is powerful the way it is to read certain books. The way it would be to read your love for him on page captured by ink and paper, even if just written in your journal.
There is still time before morning. You sink back against your thin pillow and he stirs but does not wake.
It is not yet near day. He is sad and you are—different, but there is time. It is not the lark that sings. That is enough.