Work Text:
He has it memorized. The first nine pages, with their pressed wrinkles and ink smudges, and the last four pages in a different, tighter script. Page three: sketches, caricatures, names. Many of them dead. Page seven: coordinates that follow him (too late) across Europe, chasing his ghost after the Triskelion. Page one: questions, a coffee stain. Scratched-out phone numbers. He runs a finger over the shallow grooves of the words and traces the penmanship.
In case I don’t come back.
You’ll come back.
Page twelve: his lists. There are no sketches. His own questions he’d crammed haphazard, languages running together, into his journal in Bucharest. He has a journal. But this, this was given to him.
Now he chases Steve’s ghost across the margins. Page four: I Love Lucy . He’d been in Berlin when the wall went up. He’d eaten Thai food. He eats it again, on the floor of his walk-up apartment in the black-and-white company of Ricky Ricardo, and this time he tastes it.
It’s gonna be okay.
Maybe. He’s not so confident. But he’s trying. He wraps the little notebook with an old rubber band and slides it under the chair cushion with his other meager personal effects and thinks about Yori Nakasima. How loss means filling empty space with belongings, with stories to tell yourself. He grips the dogtags so tight they dig into his palm and lets the memories punish him again.
Page nine: a note.
For Buck--