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DAY 120
STEVE'S POV
Two weeks.
It had been two weeks since Honey Daniels said goodbye.
And fuck, did he miss her. He missed the way she never knew when to stop talking, the way she could fill a room with dialogue effortlessly, yapping on and on and on. It was quiet without her around, too quiet, the silence was feeling more like an uncanny void. He missed watching her squirm under his stare, still somehow completely oblivious to how utterly beautiful she was. Quick to assume he was staring out of annoyance or judgement when really, he was just admiring how stunning she always looked. He missed making her smile or laugh, the way it melted him inside like wax near a flame.
She was the sunlight against his skin, the warmth spreading across his body like a wildfire, the sense of comfort that filled his chest.
It was cold without her.
Dark and desolate inside of his mind.
Steve had immediately tried to fall back into his self-destructive patterns - drinking until he was numb and blacked out somewhere, getting so high that he forgot who he even was for a few hours, and finding anyone willing to spread their legs willingly for him to mask his pain. Key word being tried.
Every time he looked at a beer bottle or a fine, white line of powder, it only reminded him of her. The way she held him that night to her chest as he cried, the way she stayed the whole night cradling him that way. And every chick he encountered felt tasteless, boring. None of them were Honey Daniels, none of them could even compare to her. He couldn't look at them long enough to even force himself to stay interested in a night of fun.
He had nothing else to turn to for relief.
Living was so exhausting.
Hadn't he lived long enough?
He had his fair share of years, long years of life. Steve got to endure more life than the normal person, life that others deserved more than he did. Only for it to end up being wasted with the direction his life had taken. Why should he get these years? What had he done to earn these extra years?
Captain America was no more. There was no more saving the world, saving people's lives. He had royally fucked the entire world and gotten the majority of the population blipped away - he didn't deserve to even be here.
Sometimes, he wished he could take some of their places.
Perhaps it was the reason he always kept one in the chamber in the pistol hiding away in his nightstand drawer. For the night that he finally decided to follow through with it, to end this massive suffering he consistently felt, to end the suffering he kept causing everyone else.
The suffering that would only continue for the ones he would leave behind if he were to end it.
Bucky would kick his ass for even thinking like this, he would never forgive him for it, he would say there's too many people that needed him here. Amelia would have never allowed him to reach this miserable state of living in the first place, but what good is a therapist when they didn't even exist anymore?
But Honey -
She was still here.
He wasn't sure exactly when the turning point was - the point where she became a reason to stick around. Maybe it was the moment he laid his eyes on her, bloody knees and dark brown eyes that looked up at him with more interest than anyone had ever given him. Or maybe it was the night that he kissed her for the first time, when he told himself it was purely physical, but something lit up inside of him that night - like fireworks in the night sky. Or the night of her little brother's birthday, when she was a drunken mess destroying her apartment, needing someone to take care of her, for once.
And here he was, fucking it all up because of his fear that he would do something to lose her forever, too.
Even his attempts at protecting her from himself made him lose her in the end.
It was a lose, lose.
When Steve had told her that he didn't want to disappoint her that night, it wasn't because he didn't have anything to tell her when it came to his feelings towards her - it was because she deserved so much more than him.
He didn't want to end up as one big disappointment for her when she realized that he could never surmount to what she needed him to be.
Steve Rogers had been in love before - or, at least, he thought he had. But whatever feelings he had for Honey were rooted into his glass heart, deeper than he ever remembered feeling before. It all felt so much deeper, bigger. Feelings he had no explanation for because he had never felt them until now - so how could he possibly explain them to her when she asked him to?
How was he supposed to tell her what he couldn't even understand himself?
Fuck.
Fuck.
He knew one thing for sure - he needed her.
He needed the feeling of warmth back, the feeling of solace that washed over him every time he was in her presence. That was the relief he needed. The good kind.
And he was going to get her back.
hello, friends. this chapter was dark at times, and very real. i want you all to know that if you ever need someone to talk to about your own feelings, my messages are open to each and every one of you. i take mental health very seriously, and i know that things in this chapter could be very real for some.
