The thing about memories is that, whole or riddled with bullets, they’re time fluid. We can hold on to some of them. Some hold on to us instead, digging their claws into vulnerable flesh and reminding us they’re there even when we thought we had forgotten. Muscle memory. The duck of a head, the step back, the flicker of eyes to the left.
When awake, they happen in the blink of an eye. A thumbnail covering a bottomless pit of breath crushing acts, of gifts in the eye of the beholder, torture in others’. They only show the tip of the iceberg, the depth of it echoing in nerves and drawn up shoulders. The perversion of gratefulness that you didn’t feel that whole extent of it, can move on after a moment if you’re lucky.
Dreams, on the other hand… Dreams are another matter entirely. REM sleep paralyzing the body so you can’t fight back, neurotransmitters working in overdrive, effectively slowing down time, stretching it into vast planes filled with landmines. Each heartbeat is a bomb in the distance, rattling foundations trying to rebuild themselves. Memories spreading through the phases, making you walk the miles and hours and years you were meant to instill and forget.
Twenty years is a long time to perfect electric currents and needles, creativity in the making of water and cold. The art of breaking down gracefully. Pieces with jagged edges ground smooth like ice to fit the vision of the creator. If only they didn’t regrew, rebelled if unattended too long. A process like clockwork and time is slowing down for another fifty years.
Who could possibly come back from that?
“Fuck, ugh,” Bucky groans to himself quietly.
Steve closes the sketchbook carefully, page desolate and blank, and looks over to the little kitchen island where Bucky is concocting their dinner. And sucking the life out of his metal wrist.
Steve blinks, stares. Bucky notices and stares back obliviously.
“I got rice stuck in the plates,” he mumble-explains around the metal.
The first time they beat him, Bucky forces himself not to cry. He’s had worse fighting. He had worse at Azzano. He cusses them out and sasses and gets a tooth knocked out for his trouble. It’s oddly satisfying, because he’ll have a war wound when Steve comes for him.
He’s had worse. That’s what he keeps telling himself. He’s had worse.
2
The second time they make him kill a man, Bucky starts to crack. He drops the gun and overbalances, not used to free movement without his arm. They catch him and then throw him to the ground anyway, but the boots in his ribs aren’t the worst. Steve hasn’t come yet.
The dead man is staring at him, empty-eyed. Bucky closes his eyes and bites into his cheeks so he doesn’t. Fucking. Cry.
3
The third time they rape him, Bucky can’t help himself. It hurts and it’s humiliating and the fat tears streak down his cheeks without his permission because he can’t. He wants to go home he wants his mother he wants Steve.
He can’t he can’t he can’t.
4
The fourth time they attach a prototype arm, Bucky stops resisting. He screams when they solder his nerves because he can’t help himself, but he doesn’t fight. He doesn’t cry. He takes the pain and thanks them on his knees when they give him a blanket in his cell.
Steve isn’t coming.
5
The fifth time they wipe him, the soldier comes out shiny and new. Damp with sweat and reborn through pain. Under control. In order.
The metal polish made me laugh so hard. Fantastic detail.
This is my legal property and I’m so proud it hangs in the living room.
Yes, I will scream about this until the end of time/it is moved to the MOMA.
YOU COMMISSIONED THIS? Amazing.
I asked Kevin to make him thick which I guess meant FILL OUT THEM UNDIES. But yes, I requested Bucky, but like Tom Hardy in his slutty MySpace years taking selfies.
Here’s the full glory of Bucky.
every time i cry and thank you and the universe that this exists. 😍
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