Ready Set Breathe (A Steve Rogers Destruction Story)

8 Leech

There’s not a lot that hurts worse than almost saying something and being proud of yourself to have the courage to speak up, but then stopping in the end. Nothing says more about us than the texts we don’t send and no silence speaks louder than the conversations we never have with others.

And there’s a special sort of sting as well for the people who want so desperately to say something and feel like they still don’t quite know how to say it.

Steve wanted to talk to Bucky again, like they had before, when everything was raw and nothing was hidden. He realized this, deep inside him, as he roused himself from sleep and sat alone in the dark where every raw emotion rose up to strangle him, but he didn’t know what to say. He knew he wanted Bucky to be there with him and there was a pain in his heart that he couldn’t put a name on. He wanted to tell Bucky that he was sad; not angry, not now, just overwhelmingly sad and he wasn’t sure why and he didn’t know how to go about phrasing it.

Ideally, Steve didn’t want to phrase it at all. He just wanted Bucky to be with him and to understand, without needing the words he didn’t know how to say.

But this was another conversation not had and Steve knew in the end that Bucky dealt with too much already and Steve waking up in the early morning with a leech-like sadness in his heart wasn’t a good reason to burden Bucky further.

Steve remembered, briefly, before he laid his head back down and closed his eyes again and tried to shut out the sadness, that once, Bucky had told him not to sit awake alone at night anymore. Bucky had told him to wake him, too, that he would be there for him, but Steve wasn’t new to refusing help. It was an old and an ingrained habit into him and he closed his eyes tighter and drowned in the lowness and the darkness and the leech sadness and tried again to sleep, even though everything hurt.