Chapter Text
Intro/Chapter 1:
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“Black, black, black is the color of my true love's hair
his lips are something wondrous fair
the bluest eyes
and the bravest hands
I love the ground whereon he stands
I love my love
and well he knows”
Steve was folding his Ma’s second-best lace curtains the first time he saw the ghost. Hovering on the edge of the fire escape, gripping the rusted steel with some kind of horrorshow of a prosthetic. Eyes like a war orphan, skin pale like a locket photo rubbed too long in hoping.
Steve had been singing one of his mother’s songs to keep himself company, but the words stuttered in his mouth -- then the ghost unwrapped its fingers and fell. Steve nearly ripped the curtain in half sprinting to the window, barely able to see for remembering. But the sidewalk was just as empty as a snowfield.
It was in the early dawn of the morning in the Brooklyn of 1945 and the street shouldn’t have had the crowds necessary to hide the star of Steve’s nightmares. But there was no Bucky. Steve gripped the white flaking windowsill with the rose and the briar stenciled over it, digging the battered pine into his too-big palms, breathing as if he was being choked.
Peggy won’t like it if you breathe yourself to death, punk. Not after she had Howard fish you out of that glacier.
Steve had kept himself from responding to the voice in his head that sounded more and more like one James Buchannan Barnes. He wasn’t going to respond today; he was rationing his steps towards Bedlam.
Once Steve could force his fists off the splintered sill, he hunched back over to the ironing board. Then he picked the delicately hand-tatted curtains up off the unswept pinewood floor and got back to work.
He glanced over at the phone hanging on the wall SHIELD had had specially-installed. He could call Peggy. It wasn’t say, good, that he was seeing Bucky’s ghost out his morning windowpane. Peggy’d met Bucky; not known him, not really. Not that he’d been the same Bucky to know after Italy. After Zola.
He was sure she’d take his call, busy as she was as the Director of SHIELD; she was always early into the office.
Steve kept folding his Ma’s curtains, iron still cooling on the stove.
The smell of hot metal mixed around with remembered perfume. Steve’d rented his and Buck’s apartment out to a couple of girls when he was off to Camp Lehigh. It had seemed prudent when he wasn’t sure how the whole thing with Erskine would work out.
He’d been back from the war a month and it still smelled like their perfume. A horrible part of him hated them in absentia, because maybe if their perfume didn’t smell so strongly of flowers that didn’t grow in cities that lived under a cloud of soggy smog and soot, maybe just maybe he could smell Bucky’s pomade or the cotton of his undershirt or the lingering taste of his skin where Steve had pressed him up against the wall, all insistent mouth and hands.
But no dice.
Only fake flowers.
Steve started to sing again, working his way through the hope chest Sarah Toolis’d brought across in 1913, 3 years before she became Sarah Rogers. Ironing, folding; ironing, folding:
“I love the ground wherein he lies
and if my love no more I see
my life would quickly fade away
black is the color of my true love's hair
black is the color of my true love's hair.”
Steve kept his eyes on the cloth in his unfamiliar hands; on the second run through the first love song he’d ever sung Bucky, he could have sworn to a priest he saw his ghost hanging from the fire escape again; but he let him be. Maybe he liked the music. Bucky used to love singing the songs Sarah’d taught them.