All This Time (Ship of Nails, Part 8)
Aug. 8th, 2020 01:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shieldborneAll this time the river flowed in the falling light of a Northern sun
The way Tony looks at him is almost unbearable. In the end, for all of the man’s intellect, his complicated history, his planning and strategizing, his emotions are simple, sometimes almost childlike, and right now Steve feels that like a pressure on his chest, like arctic water freezing to ice around him. What he’s actually yelling at him, he’s lost track of. When Stark talks, he talks long. But he hears, he thinks, the underlying message: You were supposed to be better. You were supposed to be the one I could trust. My father idolized you, and you were supposed to be a better man than him.
He doesn’t say anything. The least he can do to make up to Tony is to listen until he winds down. He just sits where he is in the plush office chair on the opposite side of a glossy conference table, hands folded in his lap, stoic and calm, watching the fluorescent lights reflect in the big, dark, wounded eyes.
Apparently, Stark reads this as stonewalling. The pitch of his voice shifts again. “So, what, nothing? You can’t even admit you were wrong!”
Steve breathes in a soft hiss of air and opens his mouth. Closes it again. Struggles for diplomacy. “I was wrong about you. The way I treated you was wrong. But I wasn’t wrong about the Accords.”
Some of Stark’s tension eases, and for a second Steve thinks maybe he said what the man needed to hear in spite of himself. But no…his eyes are cold now, and he sits back in his chair and looks at Steve like he’s a stranger.
“You never gave me a chance. We could have ridden it out if we’d all stuck together. We could have stayed a team, given the U.N. the object lesson it needed to learn and gone right back to normal—or better—but you wouldn’t even listen to me. You couldn’t even give me that.”
“You know what your problem is, Rogers? You’re so goddamn convinced your moral compass points true-North, the minute someone suggests compromise, you stop trusting them. You always think you’re on your own, no matter who’s on your side.”
That hurts, mostly because it’s a paraphrase of things Sam and Natasha have both said to him, if in gentler terms. But Bucky never does. Never did. Because he’s seen Steve with his back truly to the wall, five-foot-four, choking on his own lungs, and terrified that the injury some asshole just dealt to him will need a doctor, which costs money he doesn’t have. And whatever horrors and hurts Tony’s seen—Steve knows he’s seen a lot of them, more than any man should have to—the kind of mundane, bitter, day-to-day grind Steve faced for the first two decades of his life is completely foreign. A terrible privilege.
For a significant chunk of his life, Steve really has been on his own, and the people he trusted most have consistently been snatched away from him.
He says quietly, “Well, you’re not wrong.”
Stark leans back in his chair, and something uncertain creeps into his expression, but he’s come this far and he can’t not deliver the death-blow: “You ever think maybe if the Avengers had been a team, all of us, together in one place, when Thanos hit Earth, maybe the fight would have ended differently?”
“You’re really trying to put this on me?” Again, he’s hurt, but for once in his life, Steve fails to be riled. All those group therapy sessions have been good for something.
Tony’s split-second hesitation says No. Yes. Maybe. Without spoken words.
“I don’t sleep a lot, Stark. Every decision I’ve made since I put on the spangly suit: I promise you, I’ve second-guessed it in agonizing detail. And I never forget the fallout from any one of them.”
Steve shakes his head and goes on, “This isn’t about the team. This is about how we stand up to authoritarianism. You thought you could play nice with it and bring it down from the inside, but let me tell you, Tony—you can’t bargain with it. Authoritarianism doesn’t compromise. It forces you to compromise. The best thing you can do, the only thing you can do, when the bullies have you in a corner, is stand up and look them in the eye and tell them this far and no further.”
“And not everyone can get inside the system while you’re working it. You thought you could protect Wanda; I get that. But six months down the road she would have been on trial as an international terrorist and there wouldn’t have been a damn thing you could do to stop it.”
There’s a long, heavy silence, which Tony breaks with edged words: “She’d be alive, though.”
Steve looks at him for a moment, then rises from his chair. “Okay. I guess we’re done here.”
“Sit down,” Tony says sharply.
Steve doesn’t. But he pauses with his hand on the door.
“I’m not saying the hatchet’s buried,” Stark adds, more quietly. “You and me, we’ve never been good at agreeing to disagree. But since there’s no one on the planet more qualified to look over your glorified smartwatch—you’re right about that, if nothing else—we’ll put the existential angst on the backburner. Yes?”
Steve studies his face and finds there’s a little less ice in his eyes. “You just want some more chances to yell at me,” he accuses with the frailest, most anemic attempt at a smile he’s ever concocted.
“Guilty,” Tony returns it with his most charming grin, which falls away in a fraction of a second.
It’s a hell of a lot more of a concession than Steve ever expected.
He returns to his seat.
Together, they start to get to work.
Men go crazy in congregations; they only get better one by one.
There is a thing that happens to you when someone, or something, turns you into an object. You shrink inside yourself, small, so small, so that your body becomes a fortress, and you’re just a ghost drifting through the empty halls of it. You can hear, maybe, the storm outside, the battle pounding at the gates, but you’re far enough away that none of it matters.
Sometimes you can’t even see outside the metaphorical windows. Bucky used to prefer it that way. A quiet fugue state, pristine cold interrupted every now and again with a wash of too-hot blood on his hands. Once he learned he wouldn’t even be allowed to escape HYDRA by dying, he shrank down and retreated instead. It made sense.
“Those things you did,” Steve insisted, “That wasn’t you.”
In a very real way, he knows, it wasn’t. He was an observer, just letting his body operate as a weapon, the way they trained it to. But you know what they say, Stevie: evil triumphs when good men do nothing. And at least some of the time, he did nothing. How much nothing is he to blame for?
All those things he didn’t stop. “But I did them.”
The rain stops, having frozen to the ground in rivulets of pale-blue ice. Like the veins of a dying man, over and under and through the old snow. Bucky picks his way cautiously through the tumbled rocks at the edge of the beach; he slips and catches himself with his metal arm. The sensors in the palm tell him hard, cold, wet, cold. He brushes it off on his pants and steps onto the snowy sand. Thor is at the water’s edge, where chunks of ice have built up into a low wall, cracked and pushed by the wind. The sky is grey and it rumbles and growls, but there’s no visible light flashing amidst the towering clouds. Not at the bases. Maybe high up, where no one human can see it.
The thunder god doesn’t speak or look at him when Bucky comes to stand near him. That’s normal. Bucky tried, a couple times. Visited Thor, brought him coffee or fruit, tried to talk to him. He still thinks maybe if he were the Bucky he used to be, the gregarious, charming pre-war Bucky, he might have been able to get through. But Thor has retreated as deep inside himself as anyone ever has. As deep as Bucky hid inside the Winter Soldier, if for vastly different reasons. Bucky is just now coming out of his own hiding place; he doesn’t have the strength to reach into someone else and drag them free. He knows it.
He gives a damn, though, in spite of his own failures. He stands next to Thor, and neither of them speaks, just listening to the ice crackle at the edge of the surf, and the waves whisper further out in the bay.
At length, Bucky speaks. “You know, if you weren’t fucked up from all that’s happened, you’d be abnormal.”
For a minute, he thinks Thor isn’t going to acknowledge him, but slowly, hazy too-blue eyes turn to look at him. “Barnes.” Thor says, almost as if reminding himself of the human’s name. “I…apologize. I am…indisposed.”
“Yeah? Because of your brother coming back from the dead, or just the usual stuff?”
Thor flinches, and Bucky immediately feels like shit. Steve always prefers gallows humor, but Thor isn’t Steve. “Uh,” he says. “I’ll just leave you…”
“No,” Thor shakes his head and rests a hand on his shoulder. Bucky imagines it’s meant to be a warrior’s clap on the back, but the god’s fingers tremble and stay where they lie, and after a moment he thinks maybe Thor needs the reassurance of physical contact.
“I’m a poor host,” the god says. “You’ve been among us all this time and I have barely spoken to you.”
“I’m not that good with the social stuff these days either,” Bucky answers.
“I used to be,” Thor says. “When I was young. When…”
“Before things happened.” Bucky finishes for him. “I get that.” A pause. “So, uh, where’d Loki go?”
“Bathing,” Thor says. “He said the saltwater was making his hair sticky.”
“I guess a man’s gotta have his priorities.”
To Bucky’s surprise, Thor snorts and sputters at the halfhearted quip, then breaks into quiet laughter. It’s not quite a happy sound, the choked, shaky chuckles of someone who isn’t sure whether they wouldn’t rather be crying, or screaming. But they warm up after a moment, and trail off in a shaky sigh. “Loki,” Thor says, “has always been very particular about his hair.”
“Heh, maybe he’s in good company. Stevie used to give me hell about how much pomade I used.”
“Pomade?” Thor blinks at him. Clearly it’s an unfamiliar word.
“Yeah, it’s a hair oil thing,” Bucky’s lips twitch. “Or it used to be when we were younger, anyway. Not sure if they still make it. You dip it out of a little tin and slick your hair back with it.”
“Like beeswax,” Thor nods his understanding.
Bucky’s not 100% sure, but this is the most they’ve talked since…ever. “Maybe?” He shrugs. “I used to use Murray’s when I was in school, and then Dixie Peach when it came along.”
“Perhaps you can introduce Loki to these products,” Thor smiles a little, but his gaze swivels skyward again, and there is something so solemn in his posture that Bucky honestly can’t bring himself to speak again, watching him, tangled, dirty blond locks quivering in the sea wind. This is what a god looks like, he thinks to himself. A broken god.
As if echoing his thoughts, Thor says, “It’s all wrong. I know you can’t feel it, but I can. The currents, the air, they are changing. They’re dying.”
“Dying?” Bucky finds himself putting a hand over the god’s, which still rests on his shoulder.
“So much life lost,” Thor whispers. “All in one blow. I do not know if this world can recover.”
There’s a pause while Barnes searches, frantically, for words. He finds none.
“I was supposed to protect Midgard. All the Nine, but this world especially. And I…” His voice cracks.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Bucky says, but he knows damn well those are empty words. It wasn’t your fault, but it happened. How much nothing is Thor to blame for? How much does he blame himself for?
Thor turns to him, all desperate, wet blue eyes. Begging for forgiveness, begging for peace of mind. Bucky doesn’t have the latter to give, and it’s not his place to deal out the former. Instead, he does what he can, and grips Thor’s arm with both hands, flesh and metal. He keeps his eyes trained on the god’s face.
And he lets himself unshrink, slowly, carefully, gingerly, unfolding from the place he hides in the back of his head.
Maybe it’s his imagination, but he thinks he sees Thor unfold just enough to look at him in return.
((Musical Inspiration))
The way Tony looks at him is almost unbearable. In the end, for all of the man’s intellect, his complicated history, his planning and strategizing, his emotions are simple, sometimes almost childlike, and right now Steve feels that like a pressure on his chest, like arctic water freezing to ice around him. What he’s actually yelling at him, he’s lost track of. When Stark talks, he talks long. But he hears, he thinks, the underlying message: You were supposed to be better. You were supposed to be the one I could trust. My father idolized you, and you were supposed to be a better man than him.
He doesn’t say anything. The least he can do to make up to Tony is to listen until he winds down. He just sits where he is in the plush office chair on the opposite side of a glossy conference table, hands folded in his lap, stoic and calm, watching the fluorescent lights reflect in the big, dark, wounded eyes.
Apparently, Stark reads this as stonewalling. The pitch of his voice shifts again. “So, what, nothing? You can’t even admit you were wrong!”
Steve breathes in a soft hiss of air and opens his mouth. Closes it again. Struggles for diplomacy. “I was wrong about you. The way I treated you was wrong. But I wasn’t wrong about the Accords.”
Some of Stark’s tension eases, and for a second Steve thinks maybe he said what the man needed to hear in spite of himself. But no…his eyes are cold now, and he sits back in his chair and looks at Steve like he’s a stranger.
“You never gave me a chance. We could have ridden it out if we’d all stuck together. We could have stayed a team, given the U.N. the object lesson it needed to learn and gone right back to normal—or better—but you wouldn’t even listen to me. You couldn’t even give me that.”
“You know what your problem is, Rogers? You’re so goddamn convinced your moral compass points true-North, the minute someone suggests compromise, you stop trusting them. You always think you’re on your own, no matter who’s on your side.”
That hurts, mostly because it’s a paraphrase of things Sam and Natasha have both said to him, if in gentler terms. But Bucky never does. Never did. Because he’s seen Steve with his back truly to the wall, five-foot-four, choking on his own lungs, and terrified that the injury some asshole just dealt to him will need a doctor, which costs money he doesn’t have. And whatever horrors and hurts Tony’s seen—Steve knows he’s seen a lot of them, more than any man should have to—the kind of mundane, bitter, day-to-day grind Steve faced for the first two decades of his life is completely foreign. A terrible privilege.
For a significant chunk of his life, Steve really has been on his own, and the people he trusted most have consistently been snatched away from him.
He says quietly, “Well, you’re not wrong.”
Stark leans back in his chair, and something uncertain creeps into his expression, but he’s come this far and he can’t not deliver the death-blow: “You ever think maybe if the Avengers had been a team, all of us, together in one place, when Thanos hit Earth, maybe the fight would have ended differently?”
“You’re really trying to put this on me?” Again, he’s hurt, but for once in his life, Steve fails to be riled. All those group therapy sessions have been good for something.
Tony’s split-second hesitation says No. Yes. Maybe. Without spoken words.
“I don’t sleep a lot, Stark. Every decision I’ve made since I put on the spangly suit: I promise you, I’ve second-guessed it in agonizing detail. And I never forget the fallout from any one of them.”
Steve shakes his head and goes on, “This isn’t about the team. This is about how we stand up to authoritarianism. You thought you could play nice with it and bring it down from the inside, but let me tell you, Tony—you can’t bargain with it. Authoritarianism doesn’t compromise. It forces you to compromise. The best thing you can do, the only thing you can do, when the bullies have you in a corner, is stand up and look them in the eye and tell them this far and no further.”
“And not everyone can get inside the system while you’re working it. You thought you could protect Wanda; I get that. But six months down the road she would have been on trial as an international terrorist and there wouldn’t have been a damn thing you could do to stop it.”
There’s a long, heavy silence, which Tony breaks with edged words: “She’d be alive, though.”
Steve looks at him for a moment, then rises from his chair. “Okay. I guess we’re done here.”
“Sit down,” Tony says sharply.
Steve doesn’t. But he pauses with his hand on the door.
“I’m not saying the hatchet’s buried,” Stark adds, more quietly. “You and me, we’ve never been good at agreeing to disagree. But since there’s no one on the planet more qualified to look over your glorified smartwatch—you’re right about that, if nothing else—we’ll put the existential angst on the backburner. Yes?”
Steve studies his face and finds there’s a little less ice in his eyes. “You just want some more chances to yell at me,” he accuses with the frailest, most anemic attempt at a smile he’s ever concocted.
“Guilty,” Tony returns it with his most charming grin, which falls away in a fraction of a second.
It’s a hell of a lot more of a concession than Steve ever expected.
He returns to his seat.
Together, they start to get to work.
Men go crazy in congregations; they only get better one by one.
There is a thing that happens to you when someone, or something, turns you into an object. You shrink inside yourself, small, so small, so that your body becomes a fortress, and you’re just a ghost drifting through the empty halls of it. You can hear, maybe, the storm outside, the battle pounding at the gates, but you’re far enough away that none of it matters.
Sometimes you can’t even see outside the metaphorical windows. Bucky used to prefer it that way. A quiet fugue state, pristine cold interrupted every now and again with a wash of too-hot blood on his hands. Once he learned he wouldn’t even be allowed to escape HYDRA by dying, he shrank down and retreated instead. It made sense.
“Those things you did,” Steve insisted, “That wasn’t you.”
In a very real way, he knows, it wasn’t. He was an observer, just letting his body operate as a weapon, the way they trained it to. But you know what they say, Stevie: evil triumphs when good men do nothing. And at least some of the time, he did nothing. How much nothing is he to blame for?
All those things he didn’t stop. “But I did them.”
The rain stops, having frozen to the ground in rivulets of pale-blue ice. Like the veins of a dying man, over and under and through the old snow. Bucky picks his way cautiously through the tumbled rocks at the edge of the beach; he slips and catches himself with his metal arm. The sensors in the palm tell him hard, cold, wet, cold. He brushes it off on his pants and steps onto the snowy sand. Thor is at the water’s edge, where chunks of ice have built up into a low wall, cracked and pushed by the wind. The sky is grey and it rumbles and growls, but there’s no visible light flashing amidst the towering clouds. Not at the bases. Maybe high up, where no one human can see it.
The thunder god doesn’t speak or look at him when Bucky comes to stand near him. That’s normal. Bucky tried, a couple times. Visited Thor, brought him coffee or fruit, tried to talk to him. He still thinks maybe if he were the Bucky he used to be, the gregarious, charming pre-war Bucky, he might have been able to get through. But Thor has retreated as deep inside himself as anyone ever has. As deep as Bucky hid inside the Winter Soldier, if for vastly different reasons. Bucky is just now coming out of his own hiding place; he doesn’t have the strength to reach into someone else and drag them free. He knows it.
He gives a damn, though, in spite of his own failures. He stands next to Thor, and neither of them speaks, just listening to the ice crackle at the edge of the surf, and the waves whisper further out in the bay.
At length, Bucky speaks. “You know, if you weren’t fucked up from all that’s happened, you’d be abnormal.”
For a minute, he thinks Thor isn’t going to acknowledge him, but slowly, hazy too-blue eyes turn to look at him. “Barnes.” Thor says, almost as if reminding himself of the human’s name. “I…apologize. I am…indisposed.”
“Yeah? Because of your brother coming back from the dead, or just the usual stuff?”
Thor flinches, and Bucky immediately feels like shit. Steve always prefers gallows humor, but Thor isn’t Steve. “Uh,” he says. “I’ll just leave you…”
“No,” Thor shakes his head and rests a hand on his shoulder. Bucky imagines it’s meant to be a warrior’s clap on the back, but the god’s fingers tremble and stay where they lie, and after a moment he thinks maybe Thor needs the reassurance of physical contact.
“I’m a poor host,” the god says. “You’ve been among us all this time and I have barely spoken to you.”
“I’m not that good with the social stuff these days either,” Bucky answers.
“I used to be,” Thor says. “When I was young. When…”
“Before things happened.” Bucky finishes for him. “I get that.” A pause. “So, uh, where’d Loki go?”
“Bathing,” Thor says. “He said the saltwater was making his hair sticky.”
“I guess a man’s gotta have his priorities.”
To Bucky’s surprise, Thor snorts and sputters at the halfhearted quip, then breaks into quiet laughter. It’s not quite a happy sound, the choked, shaky chuckles of someone who isn’t sure whether they wouldn’t rather be crying, or screaming. But they warm up after a moment, and trail off in a shaky sigh. “Loki,” Thor says, “has always been very particular about his hair.”
“Heh, maybe he’s in good company. Stevie used to give me hell about how much pomade I used.”
“Pomade?” Thor blinks at him. Clearly it’s an unfamiliar word.
“Yeah, it’s a hair oil thing,” Bucky’s lips twitch. “Or it used to be when we were younger, anyway. Not sure if they still make it. You dip it out of a little tin and slick your hair back with it.”
“Like beeswax,” Thor nods his understanding.
Bucky’s not 100% sure, but this is the most they’ve talked since…ever. “Maybe?” He shrugs. “I used to use Murray’s when I was in school, and then Dixie Peach when it came along.”
“Perhaps you can introduce Loki to these products,” Thor smiles a little, but his gaze swivels skyward again, and there is something so solemn in his posture that Bucky honestly can’t bring himself to speak again, watching him, tangled, dirty blond locks quivering in the sea wind. This is what a god looks like, he thinks to himself. A broken god.
As if echoing his thoughts, Thor says, “It’s all wrong. I know you can’t feel it, but I can. The currents, the air, they are changing. They’re dying.”
“Dying?” Bucky finds himself putting a hand over the god’s, which still rests on his shoulder.
“So much life lost,” Thor whispers. “All in one blow. I do not know if this world can recover.”
There’s a pause while Barnes searches, frantically, for words. He finds none.
“I was supposed to protect Midgard. All the Nine, but this world especially. And I…” His voice cracks.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Bucky says, but he knows damn well those are empty words. It wasn’t your fault, but it happened. How much nothing is Thor to blame for? How much does he blame himself for?
Thor turns to him, all desperate, wet blue eyes. Begging for forgiveness, begging for peace of mind. Bucky doesn’t have the latter to give, and it’s not his place to deal out the former. Instead, he does what he can, and grips Thor’s arm with both hands, flesh and metal. He keeps his eyes trained on the god’s face.
And he lets himself unshrink, slowly, carefully, gingerly, unfolding from the place he hides in the back of his head.
Maybe it’s his imagination, but he thinks he sees Thor unfold just enough to look at him in return.
((Musical Inspiration))
