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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 unspool in the big theater down on West Glendale Avenue and Fourth back in the days, before the building was repurposed during the war effort.
Even after December of ’41, Mrs. Waterson, round of figure and motherly in her way, would project The Scarlet Pimpernel after midnight. For ten cents you could drift into that crowded little room—thick with the smell of velvet seats and popcorn oil gone stale—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 and the flare of a lamp 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, more declaration than question. 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 slope of his shoulders, the hard set of his chest, the way his posture probably betrays the edge of being alert.
“I dare you…” She lets the words dangle, conclusive, pregnant, and theatrical, as though she were some half-bored dramaturge delivering a line to an unsuspecting understudy. Her lips curl faintly as silence stretches; it seems she savors the suspense more than the dare itself. “…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 had 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.
Zemo—uncanny, inchoate Zemo—regards 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 face, leaving only the precision of a gaze that makes Bucky's chest feel like it's been pinned open, frog-like, beneath the knife.
The room itself wavers. 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.
“Can I drink instead?” Bucky asks, his voice turned to gravel, his face angled toward the boots Sam called him impolite for keeping indoors.
“We already talked about it. 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 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 in that careless way she sometimes is, deaf to the currents of unease. The silence that follows is so long it feels material—a drape falling over the room.
Bucky wishes he could vanish into the plaster, and in a way, he somewhat does; His body no longer feels anchored. 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. Not just in passing but with the kind of 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, and for an instant, she looks like she's about to puke. But then, her mouth twists upward into a crooked half-smile while her eyes stare thin and depthless—focused—two blank pools catching their surroundings without reflection.
The way the light hits her suddenly makes her look like a Da Vinci painting. Beige and scaled like a 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 with the air of a know-it-all.
“I had the word,” Sharon snaps, 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 at the end of the sentence.
“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.”
And he’s right. When the game began, about an hour ago after a dinner that consisted of a salad and dry champagne, Sharon had decreed 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!”
Silence follows, heavy and absolute. 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—sly, conciliatory. She's visibly made peace with having at least won something. “Come with me,” she says to Sam.
He rises, shoots one last glance—half annoyed, half vindictive— at Bucky, who hasn't dared to say a thing since his lazy attempt at deflection earlier on. Then, he follows her into the next room.
It feels like letting a deer 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 became parasite: how should he bear himself when it came? With studied indifference? With a show of ease? How much was he permitted to look without revealing his hunger? How much must he turn away without turning away too sharply?
But when it comes at last—when Sharon pushes open her door, Sam emerging in her wake with a shove that sends him stumbling forward beneath Zemo’s high, angular laughter—Bucky feels not revelation but instead a hollow absence.
No thunder breaks, no veil parts. The world does not tremble. What floods him instead is a strange, airless disappointment, anticlimax rising like a tide that drowns even his own anticipation.
There is no revelation, no transformation. Sam has not shifted into some impossible beauty. No silver-screen dame was conjured out of candlelight and silk.
Sam's just a drunk guy in a pink dress that hangs wrong at the shoulders and bunches at the waist. He 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 often 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?
He’d go to church after—not to confess, but only to feel clean, somewhat certain that the dim nave and its hushed shadows would scour something from him that water and soap could not. Bucky wasn't much of a Christian even back then; in truth, he had no ties to the religion. Ma was an Orthodox Jew, and Dad an unshakable atheist. Steve was the only believer in Bucky's inner circle—not devout, not sermon-fed, but with enough reverence to want vows spoken under a cross and with enough superstition to bow his head in a single line of prayer before walking into enemy fire.
And now, unbidden, the thought comes: what if Sam were a girl? Would that make the pull in Bucky less suspect, less in need of ritual cleansing? Would it be permitted then for Bucky to look at Sam the way a woman looks at a man—with that frank desire he cannot help but mistake for sin? The world has shifted since the forties. All kinds of people eat together now, sit shoulder to shoulder in theaters, no back doors for one and front doors for the other.
But none of that matters in the grand scheme of things: Sam is still be a man, and so is Bucky. And 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. Sam would be slow, patient, 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. And Sam, unlike the others, wouldn’t spit names, wouldn’t bark orders, wouldn’t call in others to watch or participate. It would be quiet, private, a kind of sweetness reminiscent of the girls Bucky used to take down by the docks in Dunkerque—clumsy and human.
And 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 power through, thinking of America. The thought scares him more than anything, because its truth runs so deep it makes everything else he ever pondered seem like a lie in comparison.
His gaze catches, almost against his will, on the lines of Sam’s arms—the swell of muscle beneath the absurd pink strap cutting across his shoulder. The 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 mannequin to be mocked and arranged. Shoulders twisted this way, waist cinched that way. A doll for their amusement. 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 itself became its own kind of weapon, stocked next to the Asset in the closet it used to shut down and reboot in.
It started in July of '56 and ended in December of '84, when the Asset was transferred over to S.H.I.E.L.D.
During the summer of the Grand Canyon mid-air collision, the Hydra Supreme of his sector had been a woman, a rarity that made her presence unbearable for the team of men the Asset was made to serve; deep into months-long missions, far from anything other than themselves and sometimes her.
She was a severe woman with short brown hair and a brutal, fat scar on her neck. She'd drop off files in person, bark out orders and then leave. The Asset's wielders lusted after her with a hunger that had no outlet; she was untouchable, a superior, inviolate. That was how it began—how they began dressing the Asset in her likeness. At first it was only bedsheets, wrapped and knotted, a joke of fabric draped over its shoulders. They laughed, and when they were done, they'd let it dress in it's usual tactical gear again.
But slowly the game thickened. The team brought back scraps and tatters from missions—discarded skirts, expired powders, dresses picked out of bins. They pressed the order on it: the Asset was to pretend. To be what it was not.
And the laughter thinned.
And the laughter grew quieter.
And the touches grew more insistent.
And the touches grew more prolonged.
And there was no laughter at all.
And what was bound to happen happened.
Here, no one laughs at Sam. Not with the serrated cruelty that once accompanied Bucky’s own dressing-up. Sharon is the most intent, brush in hand, her face set in concentration. She tries powders and paints though none match Sam’s shade. He refused at first—said it wasn’t part of the deal—but she only had to arch her brows in that sly, probably inherited way, and Sam folded.
Zemo—unreadable, unreachable Zemo—calls it avant-garde, and Sam shoots him a glance that hovers 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.
But Sharon’s hands are gentle, kind. She touches Sam like a painter would a canvas—patient, reverent. And though Sam shifts, uneasy in mind, he yields to her in body, the way one yields to a friend who means no harm. He even looks at her kindly, indulgently, amusedly.
It is too strange to be real. Too tender. A world inverted. Bucky watches and feels the split widen: one room where nothing will happen, where play remains play; another room layered over it, where everything has already happened and will happen again. The brushstroke, the laughter, the fond glance—they shimmer like mirages, belonging to a dimension he cannot quite enter.
Sharon is not a man.
That difference alone is at the source of the instant. She was built in a softness that is so foreign to Bucky that it unsettles him more than the cruelty ever did.
Sharon is not a man.
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.