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.
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