#ouch yes
having a lot of feels after reading @luna-rainbow ’s stucky meta… about the theme of partners following each other and how much of an expression of love that is for steve and bucky.
how in catfa steve wanted to go to war, to do his part, like other men. but also, i think he wanted to follow bucky, where bucky was assigned to the unit that steve’s father had been in. how bucky followed steve into the alley, dispatching the bully and pulling steve out from where he’d gotten in over his head again. how steve, in a symbolic death and rebirth into a new physical form, did manage to follow bucky to war. how steve, not knowing if bucky was dead or alive, followed him into a nazi research facility. how, in following bucky, steve truly came into his own as captain america. how bucky, in turn, followed steve back to war, and they set about burning hydra off the map. inseparable in schoolyard and battlefield. how bucky quite literally followed steve to the jaws of death– just like he said he would.
how steve, in avenging bucky, also followed him to death. how they both re-emerged, battered and worn, relics of a long-ago war forced to fight again, bucky not even knowing who he was, and steve being so horrified that bucky didn’t recognize him that he almost let hydra shoot him in the head. how steve’s most prominent memory of the man bucky had been, the man he knew remained within the winter soldier, was of bucky following steve from his mother’s funeral to offer him a home together. how steve put his old uniform back on in the hopes that bucky would recognize him. how he spent two years chasing bucky, following him again. how he would have let a helicopter rip his arms off before he let bucky go again. how when steve finally, finally caught up with bucky, he chose to burn his bridges with the country whose colors he wore (as well as with some of his new found family and most of the rest of the world) to protect him.
how bucky literally disintegrated in front of steve, and steve knelt and touched his ashes. the two of them following each other, losing and finding each other, two stars revolving around each other, over and over in circles, a line that never ends, like their vow to each other. how bucky screamed not without you in that burning factory, preferring to die with steve rather than live without him. how steve preferred to die at bucky’s hands rather than lift his own to hurt him again.
how following someone is a theme of love in so many stories, poems, and songs. orpheus and eurydice, achilles and patroclus, sam and frodo.
it’s just sad that the writers chose, as steve roger’s last act, to have him go where bucky couldn’t follow.
