With Him | Bucky x Reader | Enemies with Benefits

-91-

Bucky's POV:

When somebody like Captain America dies, the nation mourns. Employers give days off for bereavement, TV Specials pop out of nowhere, your baby pictures, teenage letters, and enlistment forms are aired to the public. When you've been Captain America's right-hand man for the (conscious) part of 70 years, your privacy is momentarily snatched and you do everything you can to keep your fiancée protected from the cameras that come to the compound every day.  

When Captain America dies, you're expected to give speeches. You have to attend funerals in enormous churches, big enough to fit small nations. You have to give eulogies on eulogies to the television networks, radio shows, and newspapers. You have to tell everyone about what a noble man he was - without breaking character - and shed your tears in silence. 

When Captain America dies, the Blue Angels fly over your home, you have to cover a young boy's ears so as not to scare him. You have to explain to that boy what death is, how it's taken your best friend, and how you'll never see him again, trying to stay calm when he asks "Why not?" for the fifth time. You have to close your eyes as you walk past posters, you have to bite your lip as they unveil statues, you have to regulate your breathing when someone brings him up. You mustn't show weakness in front of people you can't trust. 

When Steve Rogers dies, you raise a glass to the man who (attempted to) save your ass before he even took the serum. You smile with friends over the times you had together. You sit at the table, as the only person who knows who he was and what he was really like from the start with no way of effectively communicating it to the person sitting next to you because you know too much will reduce you to tears again. You try not to think about the person you've lost but about the person you had while he was still here.  

When Steve Rogers dies, you all clear his room together because it's too much of a task for one person to do alone. You stand in a room that smells like a man who doesn't even exist anymore as you flick through sketchbooks that you know his hands held as he meticulously worked on every small detail. You find a record of the song that played at your prom in the '30s, you see photos you thought were lost to time, and you find evidence of parts of his life you didn't know about, but can no longer ask. 

When Steve Rogers dies, you mourn not the loss of a figure, a hero, an Avenger, but the loss of a friend. The loss of someone who just wanted to help people. Someone who helped you through panic attacks and crises. A man who went everywhere with you, to Kindergarten, to the Stark Expo, even to the front lines. You mourn the times you'll never have, the times you wasted dancing with girls when you could have been talking to your best friend. Your best friend who is no longer here. 

But when someone like Vanya's mother dies, it's not the same. You see looks of pity being given to a boy who's only just learned that his mama isn't going to wake up. You try to be there for him, you try to explain, you try to show him that it's okay to cry, but he's still in shock at the news that the only person from his previous life is gone. 

When Vanya's mother dies, the conversations about her are impersonal. There is no possible way to figure out what she would've wanted for her son, for her legacy, for her will - because the only memory of her resides in an eight-year-old boy who, through no fault of his own and not for lack of trying, can't communicate with more than three of the people around him. 

When Vanya's mother dies, she's buried in a nameless, dateless grave, because you don't know her name. The assembly at her funeral, held in a small hall since you don't know her faith, consists of soldiers she never got the chance to meet; the ceremony is held in a language she probably didn't speak. And her orphaned son sits, sandwiched between you and your fiancée, otherwise alone in the front row.  

(744 Words)