Chapter Text
People always think that he jolts awake in the middle of the night to the sound of his own screaming, heaving and gasping for a breath he hasn’t had while encased in ice. Or they don’t think he has problems at all, despite fighting in a war and being displaced in time and losing everyone he has ever loved. Steve has half a mind to say something to them and go on a rant about how everyone can take their assumptions about him and shove them somewhere unsavoury. But that wouldn’t be proper for a man like him from the polite and well-mannered 40’s, would it?
Every pamphlet, website, person, and book he has consulted say that people who suffer from PTSD—the name change is to apparently legitimize the disorder, apparently, but Steve may never understand why there are so many acronyms in the future—have violent nightmares that make them thrash about in their sleep. There is nothing that suggests anything different. Like this, it is very easy to believe that Steve actually may not have any problems. It’s very easy to assume that Steve lives a problem-less life outside of fighting with the Avengers.
But he doesn’t. Steve wakes up with the ghost of fear and the ghost of guilt lingering in the back of his mind like he’s the soldier version of Ebenezer Scrooge. He feels echoes of things he cannot quite remember dreaming of, like maybe the sounds of a gunshot, but that isn’t quite right either. In war, soon enough, the sound of gunshots turn into little bursts of white noise and ambience, things the mind blocks out until everything is over. Steve wakes up, and he feels like dead weight about to sink through a cloud. He can’t move, can’t think, can’t do anything but vainly chase flashes of nightmares that he had just dreamed.
Some days, Steve wakes up and he knows that he hasn’t dreamt a single thing, because he doesn’t feel the urge to crawl out of his own skin. Other days, on the second he can muster up the energy to get out of bed, he can’t get in the shower fast enough, all too eager to purge something intangible from his skin. Some days he leaves the shower with pink skin, and other days he doesn’t. Some days he remembers the aloe vera, but others he leaves the serum to it, since the serum works its magic in the time it takes to go to the Compound kitchen for breakfast.
The dreams haunt him, but not knowing fills his veins and arteries with an ironclad disquiet that travels from head to toe, as if someone could cut him open and all they would see is the colour of a ghost’s curse. It has to be karmic retribution, for the innumerable amount of times that he’s quoted I’ll think about it tomorrow to himself, like he’s some sort of tragic male Scarlet O’Hara. But the dreams, they don’t resurface to his mind. There is no tomorrow, and tomorrow is not another day.
To everyone else, he looks fine. His voice isn’t raspy with the screams of all those that died in the war and his eyes aren’t red with blood or no sleep. He doesn’t scream, doesn’t jerk in his sleep, doesn’t have a red flag to show at night. So no one asks him about it, and that is all he wants. PTSD is all too real, but that doesn’t explain what’s happening to Steve. And it doesn’t matter anyway, not when he has the world to worry.
Well, at least, his world. His currently-avoiding-him-at-all-cost-world.
Steve stumbles over to the kitchen, his mind playing a loop of white noise punctuated by fuzziness. He can’t shake it, lost in trying to grasp the edge of the fuzziness, to maybe pull off the covers and reveal just what is plaguing him. As a result, he bumps into a counter, finally snapping out of his stupor. But the noise persists, and he frowns, now trying to blink it away. He’s vaguely aware that he is hungry, and of the happenings around him.
He startles again when Clint claps his hands in front of his face. “Steve,” Clint says, looking at him like he’s been trying to get Steve’s attention for a while. Steve winces; for how long, exactly? “You good, man? Sam’s been asking you why there’s crusted blood on your jaw.”
On reflex, Steve brings his hand up to his jaw and all but pulls off what does appear to be a tiny scab of blood. “Oh,” he responds, shrugging and walking over to a trash can to stop it in there. “I was shaving.”
“You seem out of it,” Sam observes, his voice a touch too casual. He’s eating a muffin: one of those carrot cake muffins that are really good. Steve decides to grab one after his calorie smoothie. “Sleep weird?”
“Mm,” Steve nods, rubbing his face and messing up his hair a little, trying one last time to snap out of the echoes. He opens the fridge and pulls out a calorie packet, then a gallon of milk. Ambling over to a cabinet so he can grab a glass, he mumbles out, “Strange night.” He doesn’t get any questions after that, as he pours out milk and mixes it with the calorie packet, but Steve, looking back, should have known better than to trust a silence.
“Strange like you dreamt that you were in a parallel universe or strange like oh my god everything is slightly one inch to the left?” Clint asks after a long five minutes, two oddly specific scenarios that are both hopelessly wrong.
Steve pauses and sets the now empty glass down, the question throwing him off at the absurdity of it. “Just strange,” he says, because it’s the honest truth. All of it has been strange. If he wants to truly think about it, the past two and a half years have been strange, from the moment he woke up and knew what it was like to be frozen in ice as a dozen people tried to warm him up. If he goes even deeper into his past, his life has been strange ever since Schmidt peeled his face off, or since he stepped out of a chamber of bad decisions and felt the world come alive.
Being completely honest, maybe he hasn’t ever lived a normal life, not normal to anyone’s standards at any point. Steve has always been too angry, too feisty, to willing to pick a fight, too bloodthirsty, too determined, too moraled and principled. Every aspect about him is too much, like every vile creature flowing out of Pandora’s box and hitting the world at the same time. It’s too much, and there’s nothing but trouble that follows.
He pauses, startling himself as another ghost of a feeling washes over him, something not concrete and yet... terrifying. Without another word, he puts his glass in the sink and leaves the kitchen, trapped between wanting to chase terror until it turns to horror or letting feelings rest without letting the malaise bother him.
“Oh god,” Steve says to no one in particular, for no particular reason, but he thinks that this is the truest thing he has ever said.
In a hurry to reach the elevator, just so that he can take it up to his room and claim a day off to sleep, he doesn’t watch where he is going. Why would he? Steve has the layout of the Compund memorized, and not even because of the serum’s perfect memory. But, since not even a perfect memory can account for other people, he collides into Bucky. Or, technically, James.
“Sorry,” Steve mumbles, looking James in the eye and hurriedly looking away, unable to see those grey eyes look back with anger and confusion. “I’ll be out of your way. Sorry.” He swallows once, looking down, and misses the way that James watches hiss throat bob.
He steps to the left, intending to give James his space, but the other man blocks him, stepping left as well. Steve looks up sharply at that, and while maintaining a confused eye contact, steps right. James steps right again, blocking him once more. Whilst Steve tries to figure out why, he sees that James’s face is expressionless. It reminds him of a time when Bucky played a long joke on him only to steal his chocolate in the end, but there is no way that James is about to do anything of the sort to him. So Steve steps left, left, and right, in that exact order, only to be blocked each time.
This time, Steve shakes out of his dreamsleep stupor and sighs in frustration. He shoves James slightly, just to get the other man out of his way, and tries not to feel bad about having to push him. This isn’t Bucky, and Steve isn’t about to let himself feel anything over a man who doesn’t really want to do anything with him.
He makes it past James, only to be yanked by a metal hand pulling his wrist. In a swift movement, James has pulled him to face him, and now they were very close. Too close, really. Far, far too close for anyone to be really, unless they were platonically or romantically used to being intimate.
“We were together, weren’t we?” James asks quietly, voice heavy and slightly raspy with disuse in the past few days. Steve looks away again, pursing his lips tightly. He has had his suspicions about what James could have remembered, but hearing was another beast altogether.
Steve has half a mind to lie and say no, or to be difficult and tell James that maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. But long ago, before James had forcibly given Steve a reminder to call him James, before James had told him that he wanted to do nothing with Steve, before James had run away for a month until Natasha brought him in and promised that Steve would stay away, before any of this mess, Steve had once promised to answer any of James’s questions.
“So what if we were?” Steve asks, turning his wrist slightly and experimenting with how tightly James has a hold on it. They have all suspected that Zola had made James’s serum to enhance his strength to be stronger than even Steve, but no one has proof yet. But right now, it is true. Even though Steve is tired beyond his years currently, he probably can’t fight this grip at full strength. “What’s it to you?”
“You never mentioned it,” James says accusingly, as if it is life-shattering information that changes even a single thing for him.
Steve huffs bitterly, wondering what would happen if he actually tries to fight James to let him go. “Right, was I supposed to mention that before or after I told you your mother’s name?” The day that James—or Bucky, at the time—had asked for his mother's name was the day that Bucky had decided he wanted to try out being called James. It was a cheap blow, but no one calls Steve kind when he is tired.
Something flashes across James’s face, something that Natasha could detect, but not Steve.
“Feel like it’s the kind of thing you mention. You know, family, lovers, job, hobbies, things like that. Ain’t that what you tell a normal amnesiac?” James looks like he wants to say something else, but switches gears. “No one else knows. Why?”
“Oh, even better,” Steve snarks, knowing that he sounds half-hysterical and half-bitter. “Let me just tell my entire team that the man who hates my face used to be the one that kissed it. Yeah, of course, when I plunged that fucking plane and forgot to fight him on a Helicarrier, oops, I still thought he loved me. My mistake. I’ll just set myself up like a fool.”
James suddenly backs off, loosening his grip on Steve’s wrist, and then letting go of it further.
For once in the last few months, Steve takes a step towards James, right in his space, tired and wholly losing all self-control. “And while we’re there, why not let them think that they have all the rights in the world to try and get us to cooperate again? Make you like me? Bet that’ll run over real well with you, having to be forced to spend time with me. I bet you’d rather eat watered down cabbage soup again. And I’ll be dying again in the back of my mind all over again, seeing someone with your face hate me. Sounds fun.”
Realzing that he’s all but backed up into James, Steve exhales slowly, and turns his back, walking away. For a long half a minute, his footsteps are the only thing are the only thing fully discernible to his ears, to the point that he thinks that James has gone if it wasn’t for James’s breathing. But no, James is there, watching him walk away. Fine, let it be.
Steve waits for the elevator to open for him, and almost even gets in before he hears James say, “Wait.”
Looking up to the ceiling, as if to ask JARVIS to hold the elevator, Steve stills like the idiot he is. He waits just like James asked. “What?”
“I don’t think I hate you,” James says far too quietly for unenhanced ears to pick that up.
Steve laughs, except that it resembles a laugh in the way a skunk might resemble a raccoon. Only to someone who didn’t know any better. “How reassuring.” And then he steps into the elevator, taking it up.