Work Text:
Sometimes we think about retiring, living by the water. Wherever we want, really. It wouldn’t be an easy adjustment, but we’d make do. I’d wager it’d be harder for the general public in some ways. Their beloved, familiar super soldier gone from the public eye.
There are mornings when I open my bleary eyes to him and imagine a family. Something I’ve never allowed myself to think about, something I wasn’t even sure I wanted before him. Two kids, or one, or three—the number is never important in those daydreams. I imagine telling stories when they’re old enough to understand, painting pictures with my words. Where I went, what I did, how I met the man with the spirit of a fighter and the soul of a poet.
Life is unpredictable, ours probably more than most. All of us, we have no way of knowing what’s in store, if we’ll take our last breath tomorrow or fifty years from now. But as I look at him now, eyes closed, steady breathing, I see the light that greets me upon waking from a dream, good and bad. There’s darkness in there too, and pain and guilt. I have my own demons. But he and I, we count heartbeats together. And breaths and stars in our minds and everything good in the world.
Maybe one day those daydreams will come true and we can count heartbeats and breaths and stars with someone new. There will always be a fight to be fought, I know, and only a tenth of them will be with aliens falling from the sky. So while we sometimes think of leaving it all behind, we could never do that, not now. This world, this life that should exist only in the pages of books, is a part of us.
I’m not sure if fate or circumstance brought us together. I don’t hold the secrets of the universe, something as hard to comprehend as eternity. But we’ve been given a glimpse of what lies beyond our world, an inconsequential rocky planet on the outer arm of what may be an inconsequential galaxy. Maybe there’s more to us than we think. Whether it’s a mysterious force that governs us or it’s all in our hands, it’s our own murky water to wade through while we’re here.
The night stars will always bring me comfort and peace, but the sun feels new to me now. It’s the ever-present anchor to dwell under when wrong and right look the same. It comes shining in my eyes when he looks at me and all the dreams I had the night before are gone.
It’s home.