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chapter three



[ 03 - CHAPTER THREE ]

if hearts and ink bleed the same



Bucky's POV

Bucky Barnes was a firm believer in the notion that there was little use in nighttime. Except for midnight parties and bedridden serenades with strangers and sleep, of course - most of all, sleep - there was little use in it. He supposed he should rephrase that, then: there was little productive use in nighttime.

It would make sense, then, that he despised the United States military in the earliest hours of the day. If someone were to ask his opinion of the army at noon, three in the afternoon, or even seven in the evening, he would doubtless speak highly of the organization. Seven in the morning was much too early. It was a time meant for tied-up women with screaming children in their cradles, for government officials whose minds roiled in their skeletal cages as other time zones churned the earth with their stomping feet and rumbling cars.

It was not a time meant for Bucky Barnes. And yet...

"Private Barnes?"

A groan trembled between Bucky's lips. He peeled his eyes open ever so slightly, glimpsing fuzzy silhouettes in the pointed tips of his lids. The army's reveille was supposed to have woken him up minutes before, though he often slept through the bugle horn's call. He hadn't at first, but after a year in service, the daily awakening faded into the undertones of his own life's song.

He woke.

He trained.

He slept.

Woke, trained, slept.

Woke.

Eventually, the seven A.M. cacophony mutated into a minute lullaby. It was no different than the songs that played in a person's head all day, hardly attended to unless that same person desired to take notice.. Even the most perturbing additions to one's life, such as a gentle alarm on the bedside table being shoved aside by the army's wakeup call, could be remedied into a monotonous routine.

"What is it?" Bucky asked, the notes of his voice settling into a low rumble in their early morning stupor.

The man speaking to him - it was Simon Hall, the young mailman who was so spindly that he made everyone wonder how he managed to carry pounds of letters at once - cleared his throat before holding out an envelope. "Says it's from a Ms. Carolyn Levy. That a girlfriend or something?"

"Or something."

Bucky grasped the letter between his fingers, trying not to seem too eager to read it yet not completely sure he was succeeding. He tore the edges of the envelope, fingertips tangling with one another in their sprint to get to the letter inside. When the paper was spread out on the cot, there was no use in hiding his growing eagerness, because there it was.

It. Carolyn's neat, methodical handwriting traipsed across the surface of the page, and my eyelids fluttered until they were rid of morning fogginess. If he was going to read this, then he was going to absorb every single fragment. He refused to lose a piece of his friend due to blurry eyesight. The calculating center of Bucky's eyes scanned greedily over the contents of the letter - Carolyn hadn't sent anything but this single page for the entirety of the time I'd been away, and he hadn't quite realized that the emptiness of her had left an emptiness in him, too.

It had been there since he'd left that very first night. It foamed, vacillating in its ocean-like journey of more and then less. The aching emptiness crept onto the shores of his chest some moments, and slid away the next, never deciding where it wanted to rest until it surged in an overwhelming storm. External stressing factors tended to initiate this storm, the low pressure catalyst surging until it collided with the high pressures of military life. His yearning for home and his duty to his country would conflict and rage and storm until, without a moment's notice, it was gone again. Forgotten.

And here her letter was, disrupting the currents of the waves once more.

"C'mon soldiers!"

Bucky fought back a groan. He'd hardly had time to consume Carolyn's letter before his commanding officer had barged into the room to kickstart the group of men's day. Of course, there hadn't been that much to consume. Mentions of Steve were there, as well as news of Brooklyn, but beyond that there were only the basic formalities of a written note.

Somewhere in the peripherals of his hearing, he detected the captain shouting out more orders, so he forced his legs to stand beneath him. After allowing himself one last glance, Bucky shoved the letter under a pillow, a pillow on a cot in a room so far away from home.

◈◈◈

The next few hours passed as if mimicking a portrait in an art gallery. The whole picture was there, of course. There were even landscapes in its fringes, displaying other works of art and pleading for attention. The other soldiers, the cafeteria, the desert spreading for miles past the camp's border - all shouting.

Look! I'm here, I have color, look at me. I'm interesting, for God's sake, just look at me.

Then, without a moment's pause: Look at me and give me my value.

And, as Bucky had learned, this mosaic was the nature of life. It just wasn't the nature of his most recent past. In his recent past, there was only a portrait. It shuddered into focus like recklessness between bouts of alcohol; it creeped and hid until suddenly it was all that was present in the forefront of your mind.

Bucky's portrait was a portrait of Carolyn. He didn't think this was very fair. How should he hear nothing of her for months, thinking of her sporadically throughout his day, and the moment she writes to him, it tears the control he had over his mind to shreds?

"Is there a problem, Private Barnes?" a sharp voice snapped.

Bucky flinched. The blond hairs occupying the portrait wisped from his mind, lingering in the corners, but he knew it would return.

"No, sir," Bucky answered. Instinctively, he checked to make sure his shoulders were straightened as the words popped on his tongue.

"Then why aren't you on the ground just like every other man around you?"

Bucky glanced to either of his sides, quickly one direction and then in the other. "I apologize, General."

His peers were all crouched on the ground, bodies curling in on themselves every half second or so. Apparently, the general had given direction to do sit-ups, and Bucky had gotten so lost wandering the art gallery in his mind that he hadn't noticed.

His back hit the ground, dust lifting in puffs and surrounding him in a bubble of weather-beaten brown. Through the thin layer, he heard a cough, and then: "your head's gotta be so far in the gutter to be able to ignore the general's loud mouth".

Bucky's eyes flicked to the side, their corners scrunched into a glare until he saw who'd spoken. His eyebrows lifted in amusement.

"Head on a girl, maybe," his friend, Jason, added.

Bucky snorted. He checked to make sure the general hadn't heard, and then turned his attention back to Jason. Over the course of the many months they'd been in training together, they'd both mastered the art of talking out of the corners in the sides of their mouths. On especially draining days, when fruitless thoughts were the necessity required to make it to the next, they'd even made jokes about deserting their duty to become ventriloquists for hire.

Bucky's lips pulled to one side. "No way."

Jason grunted briefly, his last sit-up proving to requisite an extraneous level of gruel, before he answered. "Say her name."

Bucky shot him a glare. They might have been skilled at speaking in secret, but there was a line between sharing a few comments and sharing so many to be essentially asking to get caught. His friend lifted one bright red brow, a demand in itself for the other man to comply.

"Carolyn," Bucky finally said, a sharp breath escaping his lips as his muscles released from a crunching position.

The red-headed man flashed his teeth. "Forget it, Barnes. You're in love with her. Your face says it all."

It was in moments like these when Bucky noticed it: the tightness in his chest. Most days, he rose from his bed and returned to it without ever noticing the whirlpool weighing on his sternum. But it was there.

When he remembered Carolyn, it was there. He had yet to discern exactly why. He was her best friend and Steve was, too. Yet, there was always the question that lingered. If she was a friend to him, just as Steve remained to be, then why did her name twist his insides at the most inopportune moments?

And the whirlpool didn't send raging winds to his mind, demanding to be noticed, every time he thought of her. It only happened on rare occasions, like on the hottest day of summer a few years back, when the three of them - Steve, Bucky, and Carolyn - had decided on a whim to go to the nearest beachfront. It had taken every penny they could find, in the space between couch seats, in the cracks in the cupboards, but they'd managed to make an entire day out of it. To finish it off, they'd snuck into a drive-in theater, much to Steve's dismay. Carolyn had ended up sitting next to him. She fell asleep on his shoulder halfway through the movie, and beneath the popcorn, sweat, and sticky scent of salt from the water before, he could smell strawberries. He realized she must have started using new shampoo, and that was the first time he'd felt it. Granted, he had noticed it more often in recent months, but he was certain no ulterior reasoning existed behind this.

She was just his companion, and his most sincere one, at that. He wasn't sure that he'd ever know exactly why he sometimes felt tightened-up about her - did anyone ever fully understand human emotion? He had an assumption, though. It was what his high-school teachers had loved to call an educated guess.

He supposed the thundering beneath his skin was derived from a sense of hubris. Carolyn was a girl, but she was also his friend, and many minds did not seem to understand that both could exist in the same wavelength. Thus, the pressure for her to be more to him would naturally disturb him.

He was Bucky Barnes, after all, and Bucky Barnes had never done something merely because he was told he should. Not unless he truly desired to.



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