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“...You have to let him go.”
“No. I can’t,” Steve sobbed into his battered fists. “Fuck!” his lungs heaved as he screamed himself hoarse until he fell over on his side, his body thudding against the hardwood floor. But the ache was nothing compared to the stabbing in his heart.
“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” He chanted to himself, rocking on the floor with his knees curled into his chest. “I can’t,”
The yellow sun on the apartment walls faded to white, but it felt like one blink, the minutes and hours lost to his soul-gutting screams.
He remembers hearing the front door open and close. Footsteps, water bottles, and untouched food set around him like a shrine. He rolled onto his back, staring at the shadowed ceiling. “No.” His vocal cords were scratchy and uninhibited.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. Steve was only twenty nine. But if grief could age you, he felt a hundred. Maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised. That’s all his life was when it all boiled down to it. Loss. Suffering.
November. Not yet old enough to remember but faded glimpsing of a shadowy silhouette. It was a brisk autumn afternoon, the leaves tumbling on the sidewalk when they lowered his father’s casket into the ground. He remembers his mother covering her tears in a pink handkerchief. Dark mascara splodged down her pale cheeks. There were no words, no reassurances that everything would be alright. Because life moves on. Life is for the living—but it is more to mourn the loss of the dead.
It was a cloudless July morning when he lost his mother. He was sixteen, and the world felt like it was ending. She fought and lost a long battle—but he was left to suffer in the wake of her absence. He carried her photo in a watch that belonged to his late father. When times were down, he could look at her and remember her the way she wanted to be remembered. Not frail and struggling. But with painted red life and laughter that could turn any room happy.
October. It is a cold, rainy night, a storm like no other, raindrops pelting the window’s glass as its lightning lover flashes in the background—when he lost the love of his life. Promises broken and empty, just as the apartment he sowed with his tears.
His life may not have been long, but it bursts with death. And this is one he would not take sitting down. He couldn’t look through albums and see a man with his face that he would never know. He couldn’t huddle over a hospital bed and clutch onto scratchy white sheets to bury his sorrow.
His life was not one worth living without the one person who made it so.
Crawling to the couch, he searched for his phone and, through swollen eyes, powered it back on. Seeking out what he would, there wouldn’t be time to think. He needed to act.
Scrolling through his contacts for the last person he could call in a time of need, he presses the green button and holds the phone to his ear.
“Steven….I heard about what happened. My condolences–”
“Tell me how.”
The other side of the line was so silent he would have thought he’d been hung up on. But a sigh was all he needed to know someone understood what he wanted.
“You understand what you are asking can never be undone.”
He closed his eyes and rested his forehead on the cushion. “Of course.”
The call lasted a while. The instructions were so specific Steve fought to keep the acid burning up his throat in check and to not unload the contents of his empty stomach onto the furniture.
“Is that everything?”
The raspy voice clears, but the low, weathered tone never wavers in its severe warning. “Do contact me if it works. I’ve never met a survivor.”
He exhales and nods shakily. “Will do.”
“Remember, you will owe the price it demands. Not the other way around. If you fail, you must still offer retribution for the trade.”
He hangs up, sitting against the couch on the floor, and looks out the window. The storm rages on, as does the one in his heart. “It’s not the end.”
—
What he needed was simple in the grand scheme of things but not easy. A cloth drawstring pouch filled with the disturbed dirt, ready for sunrise and the last thing he needed he could dread having to gather.
A stack of bills grants him unmonitored access, and he completes his mission with his stomach full of lead.
The slicing of flesh glides like a hot knife through butter when under the stress he is under. He applies pressure, maybe too much, and the scalpel flays open the skin to him like a butterfly spreading its wings.
“I’m sorry,” He begged, through the tears and the silent prayers that it would not be in vain. “I’m sorry.” He reaches between the muscles, hooks a finger around, and tugs. “I’m sorry,” he begs, removing the cartilage.
“I’m sorry,” He pleaded as he shut the door and sealed the retort. The heat was overbearing in his damp clothes, clinging to his skin.
“I’m sorry,” He pets the wrapped prize resting in the inner pocket of his coat.
When he gets home, he locks the knob, all three deadbolts, and finally, the chain to have peace of mind. He has to act fast. The mortality clock was ticking.
He stares into the bowl on the floor and watches the blood drain from his finger, spreading red drops across the contents.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
He doesn’t want to stop. Wants to watch every last drop leave his body and hope it never returns. The heart in his chest was pumping, all but in name. Sustaining a life he didn’t want to live.
This was his only hope. His last chance. The end of the line.
He squeezed his finger until he felt pins and needles, shuddering under the numbness.
And he sees the metal pendant covered in red and under it, the soil from a recently carved grave, he shudders. He drops the last thing—a bone carved from his own hand.
“Bring him back to me.” He pleads with tears streaming down his face and grief, thinking in his soul as he digs into the bowl, his fingers sticky with blood and dirt. He fastens the necklace around his neck, the silver pendant resting at the hollow of his throat. It was his mother’s. She wore it every day since the day he was born. A gift from his father to welcome him into the world. A blessing for a life he would never see.
He flinches from the pounding in his head, the world swaying before the edges turn black.
It’s cold. The headache is still throbbing in his forehead, but the pain is secondary. Steve can feel the cool wood under his hands, his body stiff from sleeping on the floor.
He stumbles to the bathroom, his limbs heavy and hitting the wall, using the wall to guide him to the first door on the left. He finishes and washed his hands—looking down at them to see if he can notice any difference. But after the soap bubbles have long since been washed down the drain and his fingertips being pruned, he knows he can’t.
He reaches up with one hand and holds the pendant in his palm. “How can I go on?” He whispers to no one.
“Steve,”
He squeezes his eyes tight, hoping the pain will stop the voice from breaking him any more than he already is. He grips the bathroom sink, taking deep breaths.
“Stevie,”
An ugly sob rips from his throat, and he wants to curl back into a ball on the tile floor and die.
“I’m sorry, baby. I can’t keep losing. I feel….without you--I’m lost most of all.”
“Punk.” He flinches at the cold brush on his ear, and his eyes shoot to the mirror over the sink.
“Bucky…baby, is that you?” He feels crazy.
Until he sees it. Just a flicker.
He slowly raises one hand to the mirror, and the second Steve's fingers touch the smooth surface, it’s not his own reflection looking back at him.
Long dark hair, untangled and free. Blue-grey eyes that had looked at Steve with love and adoration since before he knew what love was.
“I’m here.”
He wants to smash the mirror and smear his blood onto the surface. But he can’t, and he won’t. A part of him believed it would never work. Something of value older than himself, dirt from the grave of a man it was meant to rest, a bone from the soul he wanted carved from his hand, the same hand with the blood he needed to spill—and words. From the heart.
What was a curse to some was a gift to him. One that could never be repaid. The gift of life. His own and that of the man he loves.
A second chance. A cursed life.
“I remember a horn honking and metal crunching…that was it, wasn’t it?” Bucky asked with a monotone voice.
Steve held himself and looked at his lover, nodding his head with tears in his eyes. “You were on your way home from work. Cut across 5th Ave, and some asshole ran the light. Oh god, Bucky.” He sobbed into his hands, recalling the phone call he got. The way Steve had to look at the body he loved laying on a metal slab covered in a sheet to identify. All of Bucky’s features without the soulfulness of his eyes—the wicked curl of his lips. The lines beside his eyes set, not crinkled in laughter.
“You–you, god. Your wallet got lost in the accident and slid out of your pocket. They found you because of a notecard in a bouquet of mangled flowers hanging out of your bag. They were addressed to me, with your name on the bottom. Detective traced the purchase, and they pulled the receipt to match your credit card.” He heaves in a sickly wet breath, “I lost you. I fucking lost you, and the only thing I could think was that it wasn’t the end yet. The line has only barely begun. You couldn’t leave me. Not like everyone else.”
“Stevie, I will never leave you.”
He thumbed the pendant around his neck and felt the once smooth front was now to some degree--porous. He steps closer to the mirror and looks at Bucky’s reflection mirroring his own, caressing the now-white front of the necklace.
“This is what tethers you to me,” Bucky stated, looking at the pendant. His bone was now a part of the metal, fused together with the dark means and power he now wields.
“I did everything I could….” He wipes at his eyes. “I had to bring you back.”
“I love you.” Bucky’s voice rings out in his head, and Steve wants to kiss him. Taste those soft, pillowy lips he last felt on a goodbye.
“You’re not…mad?”
“That you found a way to keep us together? Never, Stevie.” Bucky’s reflection brushes over his cheek. It may be his finger, but it’s Bucky’s touch, and he melts all the same.
“There’s no life of mine without you—and that includes the after.”