Work Text:
Before Steve even put pen to paper, he was dead.
Not literally, of course, although with his growing list of ailments, it surely couldn't be long. But he was as good as dead, once he'd decided to keep the diary. He'd committed the worst of all crimes, the essential crime in which all other crime was contained: thoughtcrime.
"The chocolate ration was 30 yesterday," he wrote. "Today, it was raised to 25."
He looked at that for a while, trying to believe it. Doublethink. If only he could do that, if only he could really believe the ration had gone up, then he'd be happy. But he couldn't.
On the next page, he drew a sketch of his wife, who he hadn't seen or heard from in two years now. Her name was Lorraine, and she had been beautiful and artificial, a fortified blankness to her that he'd never breached. He didn't miss her, exactly - they'd certainly never been in love - but the nights were still colder without her. She'd gone, gone to find a worthier man who could give her healthy children.
--
He knew so many people who he believed to be good. He wanted to say something, to start something, but he was so afraid of what he might lead others into, what might happen to Peggy. Sharon, who screamed so furiously at the Two Minutes' Hate. Tony, who designed medical equipment for Miniluv and would never talk about it. Natasha, who stripped away the English language down to its bones and burnt the rest, drawing up ever smaller dictionaries with pleasure. People who he thought he would trust in another life, but who he could never exchange loyalty with when all of them were pinned under the gaze of Big Brother.
Only Peggy - the last one he would have expected - slipped him a note with a time and a place. He made love to her in the woods, the first time he'd ever made love.
(He'd been to the proletarian areas once, wanting to feel the touch of a woman. She'd been ragged and a decade older, and charged two dollars. He imagined they were mutually repulsed, and it did not feel like revolution. It felt like this was what was expected of him, being so low a man.)
--
He was free out here, in this dusty little room in the proletarian areas, with its peeling paint and the one small, high window. No telescreen to watch him, no children spying from down the corridor. Only a fading antiques shop, and the woman singing nursery rhymes which drifted up through the window. Oranges and lemons might both be long gone from Air Strip One, but Peggy brought him coffee, and they had the song, and that was enough.
She posed for him, as well, for his art. He must have drawn her hundreds of times, but he never tired of it. He drew her in their Party-issued clothes, with the red sash of the Anti-Sex League around her waist. He drew her in the dress they'd found around the back, a faded airy thing that would have been a deeper blue once. He drew her naked most of all. She was so beautiful. Her face stared down at him from every angle, his sketches pinned to the walls, and he felt safer in the knowledge that eyes were not always watching, faces alone could not control him. Pictures of Big Brother held no fear, when he knew he could slip away from Big Brother, carve out this space where he was watched only with love.
Peggy was the one constancy he had ever known: not that she did not change but that she was linear, the changes were measurable. He knew who she was today, and he knew who she was yesterday. She remembered things, even if she did not think about them as he wished she would.
--
"What was her name? Oh, I forget now, I think she was foreign, probably for the best that she's gone now. Anyway, she said you might be interested in the latest edition of the Newspeak Dictionary, it's hot off the presses and shorter than ever."
"Thank you very much, Mr. Barnes."
"Oh, it's James, please."
--
Opening it later, in his secret room, with Peggy beside him in the bed, Steve noticed that the 10th Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary had unusually thick pages. Or rather, unusually thin pages, three of them pasted together at a time, between each pair of regular pages there was a hidden page, another book hidden within it.
"The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism."
Steve was taken aback. This was the Winter Soldier's book, the crime in paper format that was death to be found with but which promised life within its pages, not just a heartbeat and breath but that freedom that was contained in independent thought. Steve was to be made free, and Mr. Barnes had done that for him.
--
"It was my daughter," said Sam. "She heard me whispering 'Down with Big Brother' in my sleep. Isn't that funny? Dead proud of her, though. What a little angel she is, always looking out for the party. I'm surprised I did it, to be honest, but I suppose that's how they get you. You let your guard down for a minute, forget to be disciplined, and before you know it you're an agent of the Winter Soldier."
Some hours, days, months after they'd taken Sam screaming to Room 101, James came through the door.
"They got you too, James?"
"Oh, Rogers," he sighed, pityingly. "They got me a long time ago."
--
He met Peggy again, in a dank cafe that was at once all dank cafes, a place where he had moved a knight back and forth the chessboard on the same two spaces for as long as he could remember. He drank the same weak gin and he could not remember what day of the week it was, but he could not have ever forgotten Peggy's face.
Her expression was blank; she was not his lover but only a dead-eyed stranger. She called him 'brother', and he called her 'sister' and it felt true in the worst way; it felt like they'd done something terrible in being together and the though of it made him feel traitorous and sick.
"Don't do it," he'd begged them, in Room 101. "Take Peggy instead."
Maybe they had.
He'd been dead since he decided to write that diary, he'd always known that.
He'd promised to throw acid in a child's face, if ever he was told it would help the cause of the Winter Soldier. He was so glad to be cured of that barbarism, so glad to be cured of that vanity.
"I love you!" he stood up and shouted as she walked away. "I love you!"
He looked over her head to the poster of Big Brother, and his heart was bursting with it, and he didn't even hear the gunshot.