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"The dream and the thought lie before us like two versions of the same reality spoken in two different languages. Or rather, the dream looks to us like a translation of the thought into another mode of expression, and we ought to get its laws of grammatical construction." —Sigmund Freud
February 11th, 11:36 P.M, Buccaneer Bay, Indonesia
The sky to the south of Madripoor is an evil-looking black in contrast to the neon colors the city produces. But the storm that had threatened rain earlier this afternoon has recently moved to the far shore, and downtown—still damp from the drizzle that had fallen—smiles from the ground to a sky whose northern hues are, at last, giving way to a bruised teal.
At empty and imponderable times like these, Bucky likes to employ his thoughts in a meditation that’s nothing at all but a capture of the transparent void constantly surrounding his body. Something of the desolate chill in the cleared-up night, with the black sky in the background, evokes to him another sky, perhaps seen in another life, in a far Northwest traversed by smaller rivers, sadder rushes, and angrier colds.
With the graphic clarity of a bizarre dream, Bucky feels he’s right next to the scene he imagines: a landscape for hunters and anxieties, with plants growing alongside lakes made of lead-yellow waters, swampy recesses, and sludge hidden between high black-green grass too thick to walk through.
He can’t feel the wind—because he’s inside Sharon’s apartment, surrounded by electronic warmth —but it’s there.
Even if Bucky could go backward in time and space like Steve did, fleeing the present world for that landscape, he's found he'd have no one to join there. And so he would wait in vain for what he didn’t know he was waiting for, and in the end there would be nothing at all but the slow falling of night, with the whole of space gradually vanishing into the abolished mass of the sky.
Sharon laughts a high, shrill sound that ressembles chimes bowing to the caprices of the wind. Sam tosses back a shot in lieu of completing his dare. An empty bottle—condemned now to the ridiculous office of dare-designator—rests between the four of them, glistening oddly beneath the warm light that filters from a lampshade at the far end of the room.
On another night, had the heated floor not coaxed Sam into bare feet, and had Zemo not been there at all, Bucky might almost have felt the stirrings of that precarious fellowship one only discovers in the belly of war; camaraderie.
As it is, Sam slurs “My turn,” with a tongue made clumsy by liquor. He spins the bottle, and its concave edges fracture the lamplight into shifting kaleidoscopes. It whirls, falters, then comes to rest: Its mouth points to Sharon, and its tail accuses Bucky.
“Oh, come on!” Sam cries—slow and exaggerated, like the scratchy black-and-white reel that used to ghost-up in the big theater down on West Glendale Avenue and Fourth before the building was repurposed for the war effort.
Even after December of ’41, Mrs. Waterson would project The Scarlet Pimpernel after midnight. For about ten cents you could get into that crowded little room and watch it alongside My Man Godfrey, plus the newsreels, the cartoons, and sometimes live acts.
It had seemed, then, one of the great miracles of technology that a spool of fragile film could conjure whole worlds into motion. But soon that went to the war, too.
“Why do I never get to give the dares?!” Sam protests. Does so with the confidence of a declaration regardless of what the little inquisitive lilt at the end of the sentence might suggest. Zemo laughs, smooth and unhelpful.
“Tough luck, player,” Sharon replies. Her eyes narrow, and she lets her gaze drift over Bucky’s frame with the idle calculation of someone assessing a coat on a thrift-store rack: the stains that make up the slope of his shoulders, the stitches that build the hard set of his chest, the cotton filler that probably betrays the edge of being alert.
“I dare you…” She lets her words dangle not unlike a half-bored dramaturge delivering a line to an unsuspecting understudy. Her lips curl as the silence becomes as complete as a moon in May ; “…to wear one of my dresses for the rest of the night.”
And suddenly, here, Bucky feels it—the angry cold from the far Northwest. It rises from his bones like a tide, making his flesh shiver as though his skin has unexpectedly been replaced by someone else’s unfamiliar and ill-fitting one. For a moment he almost gapes, dazed, the way a drunkard startles awake without knowing where he has fallen asleep.
The room tilts on its axis. The light trembles on the walls, the fire sputters into a flat noise, and behind Sharon’s windows, the black sky seems to collapse lower and lower, a ceiling pressing down until Madripoor’s southern shore is nothing but a suffocating smear of neon drowned in tar.
Zemo—uncanny, inchoate Zemo—looks into him with the strange, surgical wariness of a man who has ceased to be a guest and has become instead a dissector, leaning close, scalpel poised. All humor has drained from his star-shaped, singular face, leaving a common visage that makes Buky's chest feel like it's been pinned open, frog-like, beneath the knife.
“Can I drink instead?” He asks, voice turned to gravel, face angled toward the boots Sam called him impolite for keeping indoors.
“Your system will burn it all away, so that’s basically cheating,” Sharon says, and Sam nods with his eyes shut, head tilted backwards so his head rests on the bottom edge of the couch he sits in front of—Bucky doesn’t know when he's closed them, only that he looks too tired now to bother opening them again.
“We’re not the same size,” Bucky mutters, like a rat debating the ethics of murder. “It won’t fit.”
“I have multiple sizes,” she sing-songs, oblivious to his unease in that careless way she sometimes is. The silence that follows is so long it feels as material as a sunny drape falling over a suffocating room in mid-July.
Bucky wishes he could vanish into the plaster, and in a way, he somewhat does; He is both seated here and slipping backward through the floorboards, dissolving into the unseen machinery of the building. Zemo's gaze presses closer still, meticulous, regarding Bucky with the detached attention of a zoologist analyzing some rare, malformed specimen.
It is unbearable, this exposure: it feels like everyone around him is wearing clothes and Bucky is the only one who's naked, vulnerable and flawed. The fire thickens, the air congeals, and all the furniture tilts slightly out of proportion, becoming strange and hostile. The room is no longer a room but a stage, and Bucky, bewildered and unwilling, has been cast as the grotesque.
At last Sam frowns in his makeshift nap, picks up his head and opens his eyes. Looks around, dazed, still, and turns his head towards Bucky to look—to observe, really, with a steady scrutiny that cannot be evaded. Something about Bucky's stance, maybe, or his being, makes Sam exhale in an annoyed huff, like a man asked one too many times to pass the salt at dinner. His glare sharpens and then steadily boils into resolve.
“Okay. I’m using the swap joker,” Sam says, nose pinched, resembling a weary parent indulging a petulant child.
“What?” Sharon drags the vowel into a long drawl. The sound has a faint Texan burr to it, Bucky notices, though he cannot place its origin. “That’s not how it works—it’s—” She slurs, then hiccups, words tipping over one another like loose beads. “—the other way ’round.”
She shakes her head. Her body sways despite being seated. “You’re s’posed to make someone take your dare. Ain’t no one said you could take theirs. It’s against the—” She cuts herself off, bracing her elbow against her bent knee, looking like she's about to puke. Her mouth twists upward into a crooked half-smile while her eyes stare thin, depthless and focused like two blank pools catching their surroundings without reflection.
The way the light hits her pupils suddenly makes her look like that one Da Vinci painting. Beige and scaled like a sick salamander. The one and only occasion Bucky was in the same room as the Mona Lisa, it was encased in glass behind what he imagines were velvet ropes. There’s far less between ourselves and oblivion—skin that often defeats its very purpose. Or maybe its purpose isn’t protection at all, but rather to provide a place, similar to a doctor’s waiting room, in which to sit until our names are called.
“Rules,” Zemo interjects, finishing Sharon’s sentence. He's such a know-it-all, Bucky thinks.
"You're such a know-it-all." Sam says.
“And I had the word,” Sharon adds , index finger pointing at him accusingly. She looks too tired to muster honest-to-God anger though, and her voice collapses under its own weight.
“Nobody said—” Sam frowns, stumbling over his words, too, three beers and one shot in. “Nobody said nothin' about some it only works one way.”
Sharon and Zemo both raise their voices in protest, but Sam barrels over them, hand raising, lawyer-like, at Sharon. “No, no, no,” he tutts “you said—we all get one joker to swap a dare. That’s it.”
He's right. When the game began, about an hour ago after a dinner that was a little more than a salad and dry champagne, Sharon had given each person one joker to swap out a dare, to spice things up. No rule had been spoken about directionality.
“Yeah, but I was implying—”
“If it wasn’t stated out loud, you can’t change the rules!”
The fire in the hearth burns its last wood. The discarded glass cups on the floor gleam like dropped coins; the shadows deepen, congregating in the corners.
“Fine!” Sharon bursts out, flinging both arms skyward. “Whatever! Who cares?!” Her voice dips, softer, almost sulky: “I don’t even know why you’d do that.”
She pushes to her feet, sways a little, then recovers with a smile. She's visibly made peace with having at least won something. “Come with me,” she says to Sam.
He rises, shoots one last glance at Bucky, who hasn't dared to say a thing since his lazy attempt at deflection earlier on. Sam follows Sharon into her room.
It feels like letting a deer walk into the belly of the beast.
February 12th, 01:04 A.M, Buccaneer Bay, Indonesia
It would be a lie to say Bucky had not expected something monumental—life-altering, perhaps even ruinous—at the sight of Sam in a dress. The thought had gnawed at him in the slow minutes leading up to it, and the expectation itself parasitic.
But when it comes at last—when Sharon pushes open her door, Sam emerging in her wake with a pull that sends him stumbling forward beneath Zemo’s high, angular laughter—Bucky feels nothing but hollow absence. A strange, airless disappointment. Anticlimax, is the world.
Sam has not turned into some impossible beauty. No silver-screen dame was conjured out of candlelight and silk and coconut trees.
Summoned out of the door was just some drunk guy in wrinkly a pink dress that bunches at the waist. Sam slouches the same way he always does when tired, and meets the ground in an ungraceful thud in front of the couch, rolling his eyes at Zemo’s decidedly sincere compliments. He still has armpit and leg hair, gunshot wounds here and there, accompanied by a variety of scars.
Bucky doesn't even know what exactly he was expecting—only that disappointment arrives, pale and shapeless, like smoke fading against a black sun. It comes and goes, not resembling vastly in shape to when the possibilities of his other selves drift through him with such authority that they feel truer than the life at hand. Which, yeah, was actually what he was expecting.
After all, from time to time, hundreds of versions of Bucky himself and thousands of versions of the people he’s close with attack him—some strange, some familiar, some both, all demanding to be recognized. The weight of them is inimical, for each carries its own logic, its own grief, its own clarity. And when they press too closely against his mind, when the boundaries of his body and that of others feel porous, he has no recourse but to sleep—that is to say to surrender consciousness.
Even before The Fall, he had those all-encompassing thoughts asking what if. Worrying about alternative universes before he even knew the science to back it up. Long ago, when Steve was still short and had those unbelievably long lashes that almost made him look like a girl—Bucky would entertain the same smoky, free-trotting thoughts: What if Steve was a girl? What would they be then?
And now, unbidden, the thought comes again: what if Sam was a girl? Would it be permitted then for Bucky to look at Sam the way a woman looks at a man—with frank and savvy desire? Knowing what it feels like to be a child in a candy factory or a thief under the Afghan sun? But none of the common joys of worldy life matter in the grand scheme of things, for Sam is still a man, and so is Bucky. And for Sam is not that kind of man, and neither is Bucky.
Still, sometimes— when the light lowers at dusk and rounds Sam’s face into sweetness, or when Bucky catches the half-second before Sam speaks the words Bucky already knows he will say, fondness surges in him like a prophecy fulfilled, and he wishes, against all reason, for it to be otherwise.
There is no church in Madripoor, and even if there were, he doubts he could justify entering it. That isn’t his way anymore. Perhaps it never was. Nonetheless, he aches to repent for the trespasses of thought, the natural-unnatural desires that feel like inheritances of evil. He knows it is useless. To repent is to believe that what has rooted itself might be cut away. But this is no weed. It is a seed planted long ago, grown through him, made fruit of him. It's too late now to erase it, and even later yet to name it anything but what it is: a shadow he has carried, and will carry, until the end.
It’s in Wakanda that he learned such things could be more nuanced. A girl with a girl could work just fine—procreation is not the end goal, Shuri had once said with that sideways candor of hers, and though Bucky had wanted to argue, he knew she was right. And of course there are men who like other men and who live just fine, as well.
Which Bucky knows must be true. For example, if Sam were that kind of man, Bucky is sure he wouldn't be anything but just fine.
In bed Sam wouldn't be harsh, or even cruel, to anyone— let alone Bucky. And such wouldn't change upon learning how some people had been so, back when Bucky was only a weapon to be used in beds Assets never sleep on. Sam would be slow, and patient and maybe even gentle. And Bucky would pretend to like it, because he’d be ready to do that for Sam. He wouldn’t just lie there and take it—he’d try. He’d put effort into it. Sam wouldn’t spit names, wouldn’t bark orders, wouldn’t call in others to watch or participate. It would be quiet and private and sweet and clumsy and funny and human.
Though even if it wasn’t—even if Sam were rough, even if some beast broke loose in him in those moments—Bucky has the sudden, terrifying certainty that he would let him. He would lie there and think of America.
His gaze catches against his will, on the lines of Sam’s arms—the swell of muscle beneath the absurd pink strap cutting across his shoulder. A sight ought to distort Sam into parody, if not into beauty—some carnival figure like the women with beards from the circus that used to set up downtown every fall in Southeast Brooklyn. But it doesn’t, either. There’s no transformation, no grotesque inversion, as much as there is no change into a Josephine Baker-esque figure.
It’s only Sam.
Sam smiling. Sam drawing lines in the sand. Sam deciding to cut his tangerine in two. Sam picking at the dry skin around his nails. Sam smacking his lips when he's annoyed. Sam who has had the same haircut since fourth grade.
But if clothes don't change someone’s nature, then did the Asset look like a weapon in a sheer suit, when its wielders made it wear those sort of things? It—he, fuck—never saw his reflection; he was never allowed to. But the makeup felt caked and chalky, ground into his skin by men who smelled of alcohol and sweat and unwashed clothes. They would laugh as they smeared it, coarse and endless, their hands rough with grease and dirt as if the weapon of him were not a weapon but clay, a mud pistol to be mocked and arranged. Shoulders twisted this way, waist cinched that way. He imagines it must have been grotesque. He imagines they must have laughed all the harder because it was grotesque. And they did laugh—so much. Laughed until the sound became its own kind of weapon, stocked next to the Asset in the closet it used to shut down and reboot in. As the laughter thinned. As the touches grew more insistent. As the glances grew more prolonged. As there was no laughter at all. As what was bound to happen happened.
Here, though, no one laughs at Sam. In this reality, the cruel God named Glee's reign has ceased and Zemo—unreadable, unreachable Zemo—calls the dress avant-garde. Sam shoots him a glance that rests between irritation and weary amusement.
Realistically speaking, Bucky knows no one will hurt Sam here and now, not the way Bucky has been hurt there and then. Still, his eyes drag to the door, to the nearest line of escape. To Zemo. To the words that might, in an instant, twist the air into something other. Sharon’s hands are gentle and kind. She touches Sam like he's a sculpture or a canvas or a brand new piece of clothing.
Bucky watches intently as reality splits and widens : Sharon is not a man, and Bucky isn't, either.
Bibliography
- Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Macmillan, 1900.
- Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Cambridge UP, 1886.
- Pessoa, Fernando. The Book of Disquiet. Translated by A. M. P. de Sa, Viking Penguin, 1982.
- Sealey, Nicole. The First Person Who Will Live To Be One Hundred and Fifty Years Old Has Already Been Born. Hanging Loose Press, 2020.
- Spinoza, Benedict de. Ethics. Hackett Publishing Company, 1677.