Work Text:
Steve loved colors. He loved the shades of blue in water, the hues of brown in Bucky’s eyes, the shifts of yellow in a sunrise. He captures the colors in his sketchbook, pencils lying scattered around him all the time. It’s muscle memory. Taking down the visual and then adding in the colors. He loves the oranges and greens and rustic browns on the trees in the fall, and he loves the bright white of snowflakes in the winter. There’s a vague memory of blandness, black and white and gray, but Steve doesn’t dwell on that. Not if he has all these colors to capture, to save and record and love.
Bucky doesn’t always hold the same love of colors as Steve, but sometimes Steve will catch him staring in awe at the trees, the river, the quilted bedspread on their rickety bed in their apartment. Mostly thought he prefers comics to nature. But Steve figures that’s ok; the comics have plenty of color on the front for Bucky to enjoy.
When Bucky gets drafted for the war, Steve notices him enjoying colors more. He sits with Steve on the front porch as Steve (wiry and bones and coughs) draws the street. He points out colors and how he perceives them and Steve smiles and replies with his own description of them.
“Brown like dirt.”
“No, brown like mud.”
“That’s just being picky.”
“Artist’s gotta be picky, Buck. Mud brown is darker than dirt brown.”
Bucky only rolls his eyes, but there is a smirk on his face so Steve cheers internally.
For the most part, the drawing is made of browns and soft reds, with black splattered throughout for emphasis: shadows and smoke and reflections. Bucky looks pained when Steve plucks the charcoal pencil from the worn out wood; he looks away and Steve frowns, but lets it go. Bucky has been moody since he got drafted; his orders aren’t in yet, so Bucky is anxious and nervous and moody. Steve doesn’t understand why Bucky doesn’t want to go to war; Steve wants to go, he wants to fight for his country and protect that which he holds dear.
The night before Bucky gets his orders Steve feels him shaking against his back in their shared bed. (Bucky insists they share so he can keep an eye on Steve during the night; Steve doesn’t fight it. He enjoys having Bucky so close. It’s calming and hopeful, ever since their kiss in the alley behind Barney’s Diner. Nothing more than one kiss, but Steve can hope.) Bucky’s curled around Steve like Steve will fall apart if he doesn’t.
“Hey, Buck, it’s gonna be fine. You’ll do great and maybe I’ll wind up joining you one of these days.”
“God, Steve, no…” there’s a break in his voice that’s wrong. Bucky doesn’t break, even when his eyes are wide and Steve’s having an asthma attack and Bucky tries to hide how scared he is. He doesn’t break. “No, don’t join.”
Steve shuts his mouth and traces a hand over the arms around him. “Bucky, you’ll come back.” Steve’s scared that he won’t, but Bucky’s a good fighter and a smart guy. Surely he’ll come back, right?
“...I don’t want the colors to leave you…”
Steve doesn’t know if he heard right because Bucky’s talking quietly, mumbling against his neck. “What” He gets no reply.
The next day Bucky gets his orders and prepares to leave; Steve gets recruited by Erskine and is so excited.
Steve—post-serum and healthy—attacked the Hydra base on the slightest chance that his friend might be alive. He killed soldier after soldier (they were cloaked in black: plain, boring, dirty, ugly), released all prisoners he came across (most wearing dark greens and deep browns), and finally came to find his friend (his deep brown hair was mused and his eyes, those beautiful perfect Bucky brown eyes, were rimmed in dark circles and red). Muttering to himself and strapped to a table, feverish and weak. Without a second thought, Steve had broken the straps and talked James “Bucky” Barnes into awareness.
“Steve?”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s me.”
“Steve.”
The smile lit his world and he pulled Bucky from the table. Bucky sized him up and Steve let him, just glad that Bucky wasn’t dead, not once, not for one moment. He caught himself cupping the side of Bucky’s face and pulled away.
“You’re taller.”
“Yeah, I know; come on, we gotta go.”
Wrapping his arms around Bucky, Steve dragged them from the factory. He made a promise to himself to draw Bucky as many times as he could, in every possible color, at every possible moment. He never wanted to lose Bucky, he never wanted to ever feel the desperation he had felt when the words “remaining one-O-seventh” had been uttered. He never wanted to think Bucky was dead, never wanted
And if Bucky shook due to whatever drugs Zola had given him and if Steve held him throughout the night, the Howling Commandos said and asked nothing.
Bucky falls from the train and Steve is alone. He doesn’t remember being alone, but he is. It was always Steve and Bucky, Bucky and Steve, Captain America and James Barnes, SteveandBucky. But it’s not anymore and not even the colors provide comfort for what Steve has lost.
The Howling Commandos try to offer comfort; a select few even etch in the colors on the pencils, as if Steve doesn’t know what they are anymore. Steve doesn’t care and burns the browns that night in the campfire.
Steve goes down with the plane and wakes up seventy years in the future, alone and strange and a hero and tired. The colors are still there, they’ve always been, and he draws what’s new. New televisions, new phones, the Google icon is scrawled in three rows in multiple fonts on one page with the colors tweaked and changed in each one.
He never once touches brown.
Bucky is alive but not alive and not Bucky and Steve wonders if it would’ve been better if they were both dead as a dog. Would they be in heaven together? So Steve can be happy dreaming a little, shoot him. No, don’t do that; Bucky shoots him plenty of times for Steve to know he doesn’t ever want to be shot again. Especially not by Bucky, never by Bucky, but this isn’t Bucky so Steve copes. He traces Bucky—this Winter Soldier—after the whole affair of SHIELD falling.
Sam helps him. They track Bucky to Brooklyn and oddly enough Steve isn’t surprised. It’s their old apartment that Steve first thinks to check; it’s oddly enough been kept up, the building having been renovated for safety reasons, but the government kept Steve Rogers’, Captain America’s, apartment and apartment building mostly original.
They find Bucky there and he attacks. Steve understands, they cornered him, so with Sam just barely regaining consciousness and becoming acquainted with a few broken ribs across the room and a knife to his throat Steve talks.
“We shared the bed, you said it was to keep an eye on my health, but I never believed that. We--” The knife digs into his skin, but Steve keeps talking. “We had biscuits or oatmeal every morning, terribly dry oatmeal.”
Bucky’s face is cold but his eyes (brown, beautiful, lost and open and hopeful) are curious even if the knife doesn’t let up; he’s so close Steve could kiss him but he doesn’t. He keeps talking.
“You gave me your jacket when we went to Coney Island, remember? I threw up on your shirt but you didn’t care; you carried me home, remember? You felt so guilty.”
The knife pushes closer to his jugular. “I don’t know you.”
“Yes, you do.” Steve is desperate, he’s tired and lonely and he’s missed the brown, the feeling of Bucky’s hair against his hand in the early evening when he’d come home from his third job (the butcher was always the most exhausting) and drop against Steve on the couch, falling to sleep within seconds. Steve would card his hand through the soft earthen brown hair, damp with sweat, and watch Bucky sleep. Three jobs for a teenage boy was too much. “You do, we… We kissed.”
The knife clatters away and the cold face smoothes into something more Bucky. “We…” he swallows and Steve wants to cry; he doesn’t move away from the wall. “Behind…a diner. Five dollar dinner, right? It was…your birthday…”
Steve nods. Bucky looks up at him and his face scrunches into a hilarious gesture of slight confusion.
“You were smaller then.”
Steve’s at a small café in New York City, not too far from Stark Tower where he and Bucky have settled into something resembling normal. They’ve made progress and Bucky remembers so much and they’ve started to build a relationship. There are little moments, touches between them. A caress, the touch of hands, maybe a press of lips here and there. Everybody knows, but they still take it slow. Nick Fury has even made plans to integrate the Winter Soldier (Bucky insists on a name change but isn’t sure what yet) into the Avengers and so has sent Bucky on a small mission with Natasha.
So that leaves Steve on his own. Sam and Tony and Bruce are back at the tower, Clint is somewhere doing something (probably a mission if Natasha’s vague answers to their questions are anything to go by; which they are). So Steve sets up shop at the café and draws the people he sees. A business woman is dressed in a light pink blouse and rich blue dress pants; a man talks on his cellular phone, his red hair standing on end and his brows dipped down in concentration (Steve thinks it might be his girlfriend, wife, significant other on the line and that they might have gotten into an argument); two girls, one in a light yellow dress and the other in a brown jacket and green shirt, sit and sip tea, holding hands as they sit close to each other.
Steve records all the colors, all of them, in his sketch book. He’s finally touched the brown, started drawing Bucky again after showing all his war sketches of his friend (cleaning a rifle, sleeping, reading), so the girl’s jacket is no problem to shade in.
He’s just finished the man’s hair and is moving on to the girl’s jacket when the headache comes. The colors fade, in and out, going from a startling gray to their vibrant colors again. It lasts for three minutes exactly and the headache becomes worse and Steve finds himself clutching his head as the changes slow, finding them fixed on gray, stopping completely and leaving Steve’s world colorless. He blinks a few times; has he lost his sight, maybe has something in his eye? Is he sick? Is the serum having negative side effects? So late, though?
As he gathers his things, his pencils that are all just different shades of gray, he fails to notice the sympathetic looks the people around him give or the whispering going on.
“Colorless and alone.”
Steve goes to Sam, because Sam is his friend.
“Sam, I can’t see.”
Sam looks startled at this declaration, but takes it in stride. “Oh, um, maybe we should have Pepper look at you or call up Fury; this can’t be good, you can’t see at all?”
“No, no, I can’t see colors.” Steve waves a hand at Sam, fails to notice the slightly darker gray of Sam’s face drain to a near white. “It’s all gray and white and black, it’s weird.”
“Don’t you…Don’t you know?”
Steve frowns; he just wants to see colors again. “Know what? Why can’t I see colors?”
How can he have gone his whole life not knowing this? It's so crucial, how could he? Sam can barely keep the tears back as Steve's confused, gray face pinches in fear.
"Sam," Captain America repeats his question. "Why can't I see colors?"
Sam remembers when he himself lost colors, the day his wingman was shot down from the sky. He remembers the pain and loneliness and feeling of absolute loss; isolation, even.
“Steve. There’s…Oh god, no one told you? Didn’t your mom or, or an adult when you were little?” Sam swallows thickly. “Steve, when you meet your soulmate, they…they can color your world, or be a name on your wrist, or...”
Steve’s heard of soulmates before. There are different types; ones where their name is somewhere on your body, ones where you have a timer or date on your wrist or ankle or hip counting down to your meeting date. He’s never heard of color soulmates, but it makes sense. Because he really can’t remember a day without Bucky, can’t remember a day where there wasn’t color. But now there isn’t. So that must mean…
The sketch book falls to the floor with a clatter, pages flapping open to reveal gray where beautiful honorable loving brown should be. “Oh god, where’s Bucky?”
Natasha apologizes. She apologizes and her voice breaks and that doesn’t make any sense because Natasha doesn’t break, she’s never ever broke before. It was a stray bullet that hit Bucky, so close to his heart; too close. He was conscious for exactly three minutes, Natasha stemming the bleeding and talking to him to keep him awake, anything to have kept him alive, before his heart stopped and Natasha had had to call in to Fury for an EVAC; the mission went unresolved.
Steve throws up every morning when he wakes up and the bed is cold and there’s no color. There’s no soft breathing against his shoulder, no arm over his waist, no soft brown hair tickling his ear, no whisper of “...I don’t want the colors to leave you…”. And doesn’t that sentence from years ago make so much more sense now, now that there are no colors?
He throws up and cries and picks up his shield to save the world because that’s what he does.
He’s Captain America, and he’ll save those he can and cry about those he can’t and never forget those he has loved.
The gray will make sure of that.