Chapter Text
Born from the tip of a wave foaming at the mouth, it licks across the water, before being caught up in the air current. It climbs up the roughness of cement protruding into the sea, presses against the brim of a cap fit too loosely on curly black hair, picking it up and carrying it off a dozen feet before letting it fall on brick fitted roads.
Steam from a warm cup of coffee in the hands of a man with sleeves pushed up to his elbows mingles in its folds as it twists and turns, rounding the corner on a street. It rushes and blows through limbs, tasting the moisture on folds of clothing hung out to dry, rustling leaves on trees casting acute angled shadows on stone and wood. A gloved hand settles on the pleats of a skirt with a soft gasp of surprise when it ripples the pale blue fabric.
In a matter of minutes it travels from the oil glazed waters of the docks to the littered streets of Brooklyn. It carries the sounds of dogs barking, of shutters rolling up; the smell of geraniums and summer phloxes from the crates of a florist sprinkling water on his plants. It whispers through alleys, invisible against the rainbow of early sunlight on glass. Then through rusted metal, it pools into a room with a window left open, caresses a lock of golden hair falling over a narrow face with parted lips deep in sleep. Across the doorframe, it knocks over an empty beer can and finds the edges of paper of a sketch book on a coffee table. It plays with it liberally, spreading it open and scattering dozens on pine hardwood, discolored with use.
Then it whiffles out through a window with frames of splintered wood in the kitchen. As unannounced and quick as is its nature.
---
“Shit.”
Bucky stares at the floor littered with Steve’s drawings as he throws his towel over his shoulder. He knows the guy has them all stacked in some sort of order, probably by date, but he has never seen him put the dates on his sketches. He hasn’t actually seen his sketches all that much apart from a few times Steve wanted him to see a specific one. Like the one of the toothless baker at the corner that keeps trying to overcharge them for a loaf of walnut bread. Or that girl with red ribboned pigtails they had watched feeding the pigeons at the Battery Park. Or the actor dressed in drag rubbing his fingers on the stump of the Wishing Tree in front of the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem. He will occasionally show them his sketches of things they have both seen but he keeps the rest to himself and Bucky doesn’t pry. All men have things they want to keep to themselves.
Now there they are though. He considers waking Steve but knows he needs any extra shut eye he gets after that asthma attack that had him, tough as balls Steve Rogers, near tears last week.
So Bucky sighs and drops the towel on the back of the chair with the one shorter leg he has been meaning to fix for three months. He kneels on the floor carefully, trying not to step on any of the sketches and pulls paper after paper in front of him. After the fourth one, he realizes there is a constant in them. After the ninth he realizes it is himself. Twelfth marks him discarding all pretense in trying not to look. He lifts it up and stares at the work of Steve’s hands. It is him (nearly all of them are him, aren’t they?) dressed in a shirt with the top three buttons undone, slacks rolled up to his calves. His hair is wet and he is smiling and there is excruciating detail in the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, the glisten on his eyelashes, the light in his eyes. He remembers the moment. It was when Steve had thought the best solution to stop Bucky from complaining about the heat ceaselessly was to drop a balloon full of water on top of his head. It had erupted in a battle of creativity as they had run out of balloons too fast but soon found recreational uses for the latex gloves Steve’s medicine box was stacked with and even condoms from Bucky’s own stash, as Steve had noted, he didn’t have one. The trick was to catch the other unprepared and there was only one rule. Not in the house. This was the moment that had started all that.
A long breath rushes through his lips he hadn’t realized he was holding. He reaches for another sketch, half hidden under the couch and isn’t surprised to see himself again. Dressed sharp and handsome, walking down the street, head down, lighting a cigarette on his lips. From the angle he understands Steve has to have been out on the fire escape, watching him leave for one of his dates. His eyes are narrowed in slits against the low evening sun, light brimming across his slicked hair.
Then he finds one with him asleep on the couch, belly down. An arm under the cushion, the other thrown over, fingers nearly touching the floor. His lips parted, hair falling over his face. Feeling the urge to brush it away, Bucky runs a hand through his own hair and wonders with a jolt if that’s how Steve was feeling as well, drawing him as he slept.
He leans back, resting against the foot of the table and looks at the floor still littered with at least thirty or more pages of Steve’s drawings. There, close to the edge of the counter is one of him reading a newspaper, his temple resting against the heel of his hand, a lit cigarette in his fingers. He looks focused and sullen, jaw set and shoulders tense. It was from when he was trying to find another part time job after the recession had hit and he had realized the one he had wouldn't be enough, even with Steve working his ass off at the post office.
There is one of him dancing, just a few inches away from his foot. Steve has drawn the girl Bucky was dancing with at the Saturday Night Dance as intently as he has drawn him and that puts a sour, acidic feeling in the pit of his stomach. The drawing is beautiful, they look beautiful dancing, her head with the curls of her hair pooling on her shoulders tilted towards his face at just the right angle, smiles mirroring one another, gazes bound. They look solitary, removed from the rest of the world Steve has sketched as silhouettes in the backdrop. It’s like Steve was just an outsider, another silhouette, watching, never belonging in the picture.
That’s wrong, he wants to say. I can’t draw for Jack shit but you are in the picture of every memory that ever mattered to me, he wants to say to his face. You are not a silhouette. You are my center.
My center, he repeats to himself shoulders rounding, head bowing down. Another sketch catches his eye, partially covered under a sketch of two seagulls whirling over the bollards at the docks. He pulls at it, almost apprehensive, and finds himself drawn in the act of reaching out with a look of complete devotion in his eyes. It must be one of those times he reached to ruffle Steve’s hair out of sheer playfulness or grab the back of his neck as means of saying ‘I’m here for you’. His extended hand is only drawn up to his forearm, behind it, his eyes alight with attention, humor, compassion. It’s a portrait, mostly just his face and he can see Steve’s pencil marks smoothed in with the tips of his fingers, rubbed into the paper, casting shadows along the length of his jawline, accenting the touch of light on his forehead, shading the fullness of his lower lip.
He raises a hand to his face, feeling the blood rush. His heart speeds up, beating harshly against his ribs. Some of the sketches are from years ago, with him wearing shorts and sleeveless shirts, grinning widely on a bicycle. There in that one, he can’t be more than fourteen, standing at bat with baseball shorts and fake Adidas shoes. The quality in drawing perfects over time, his later sketches captured with such reality, he can count the pores on skin, convince himself he could feel the texture of fabric.
Steve had been drawing him for almost a decade. Steve had been watching him for a decade. He had been eroding pencil after pencil drawing the contours of his body, running his fingers on the planes of his muscles, studying every detail of every part of him with those piercing blue eyes for a decade as Bucky lived, laughed, worked and struggled unaware around him.
In a split second Bucky’s world comes to a halt. In a single suspended moment, he feels himself being extracted from his individual perspective of every memory and fully understands the reason why Steve doesn’t want to come with him on double dates, why even when he does, he doesn’t really try to make a move on any dame other than being as polite and gentlemanly as he knows how to be, why he avoids looking at Bucky too long in the eyes, why he hasn’t felt comfortable with Bucky seeing his body since they were teenagers. Why, when he was so sick that one time and he couldn’t eat and he couldn’t sleep, when he couldn’t even breathe and he had held Bucky’s hand at three in the morning, and had said to him with a voice barely audible over the rattle in his lungs and with tears in his eyes ‘you are the most important thing to me, Bucky,’ and when Bucky had told him it was the same for him, he had smiled so painfully Bucky had been sure he wasn’t going to make the night, but Steve had said, his voice breaking ‘I wish… I could tell you,’ and he had fallen asleep with exhaustion before Bucky could ask him what he wished he could tell him.
When the stir of the wind finds his hair and the sounds from the street reaches his ears again, Bucky runs his fingers over his eyes, wiping the wetness away. His throat feels tight, on the verge of bursting and there is a part of him so sore from the realization he feels raw down to his bones. A part of him wants to pick all the drawings up, throw them on Steve’s sleeping face and demand an explanation, demand a reason why he wasn’t told, why he was kept in the dark, why he had never shared. Another part wants to slip into his bed like they have occasionally been doing since they were kids, wrap himself around his thin body and hold him tight enough to crush all his delusions, all his insecurities, every single one of his renouncements.
He finishes putting the drawings together, placing them back into Steve’s sketchbook as neatly as he can and leaves his ashtray on it. He walks to the bathroom and washes his face with two handfuls of freezing water. When he lifts his head, his reflection in the mirror looks as shaken as he feels. Brims of his eyes red, hair out of place, pupils dilated. He has got his work in an hour and he looks like he got shit-faced drunk the night before. He decides he doesn’t care.
He goes back to their room and stands at the doorway. Steve’s still asleep on his own bed, curled on his side with a hand under his pillow and the other flung across his stomach. He has kicked the sheets away and is wearing a sleeveless shirt with shorts that are too loose around his narrow hips. He looks frail, small. He looks lonely.
Bucky wonders what he is dreaming about.
He crosses the room in a stride and half and sits on the floor next to him as quietly as he can. He watches his face with the same attention Steve had been watching his for a decade. He is breathing evenly with a soft sigh too low to be called snoring. There are light freckles on his cheeks, a bit over the bridge of his nose that he knows won’t be there in winter. He has never told Steve it is one of the reasons he likes summer. He can’t spew poetry and he can’t draw a straight line in charcoal even if he tried but Bucky loves. He loves the same way people align notes after notes to make music. In full immersion and minute appreciation and there isn’t a thing about Steve he doesn’t love.
He slowly reaches with a hand, fingers feather-light against golden hair, brushing it away from his face. He stares at him for a long time, trying to understand when he became so difficult to read. The same Steve who got in way too many fights cause he couldn’t keep his mouth shut, the same one that couldn’t talk about necking anyone without turning beet red all the way up to his ears, had kept something so grand a secret for such a long time and Bucky had never known.
Then his hypocrisy slams into him with a force that knocks his breath away. He had missed the single most important thing for the entirety of a decade. He had missed Steve’s perspective. How imbued in every one of his sketches and saturating every line on paper, there is Steve’s longing. His loneliness. Because he doesn’t know either.
Bucky leans in, face inches away from his face. “I wish… I had told you,” he whispers. Steve sighs in his sleep, brows furrowing slightly. He keeps sleeping. He keeps dreaming.
He keeps not knowing.
“I’ll fix it, Stevie.”
---
It finds him in work slacks and a buttoned up shirt a few hours later. There is a sheen of sweat on his forehead as it cools it on his skin with a saltine gust from the sea. He raises his head to the breeze of its folds and takes a deep breath. When he opens his eyes his eyes are as light as the foam that created it. He looks like he’ll take flight with it, join the rolls of the southwester across the streets of Brooklyn to a tiny apartment tucked in an alleyway where a boy with golden hair and eyes bluer than the august sky looks curiously at an ashtray left on his sketchbook.