Freezer Burn drabble
7 Jan 2014 15:30![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
domarzione... under 500 words, which is practically a haiku for me.
They would begin at the Grand Canyon, Steve decided. It had been the mythical goal of their past lives together, so it could be the symbolic starting point of their new ones. Once upon a time, when they’d been boys in Brooklyn, it had seemed as strange and distant a place as they could imagine. China had been less foreign to them — they saw Chinamen every day, but they’d never met anyone from Arizona or knew anyone who had. It was the land of John Wayne and Tim McCoy, of stagecoaches and saloons and sagebrush, and it had been everything their lives hadn’t been and wouldn’t ever be.
(Steve had met McCoy during the war, first during his USO tours and then, later on, during his Commando days. McCoy had been a colonel in the Air Corps and had congratulated Steve on his getting in to the ‘real’ war and not staying content punching Hitler on stage. It had meant a lot to him at the time.)
Bucky, of course, was still not one for admitting to appreciating symbolism. “We’re both products of science,” he had said with a shrug when they’d presented their plan to the others. “Might as well see what nature can do.”
But Steve knew that Bucky understood. They couldn’t ever be the young men for whom seeing the American West would be a broadening of their horizons; they couldn’t have been those men even if they’d both come home after the war like they should have. This was putting those childhood dreams to rest and beginning to figure out what their new dreams would be. Figuring out who the men they had become really were and where they fit in a time and place that they couldn’t have ever imagined themselves to be.
The first picture they sent back was of the canyon, which was much more majestic than they could have imagined as boys or men. Steve took the picture because he was the one who was supposed to have the eye for that sort of thing, but Bucky supplied the caption. “Not bad for a hole in the ground.”
The second picture they sent back was from a deserted stretch of highway, a Steve-sized koala sitting on a Harley next to a sign that warned for animal crossing. Because as different as they were from the boys from Brooklyn, not everything had changed and Bucky was still able to get Steve to go along with his terrible (awesome) ideas.
[the koala comes from Revenant, but all you really need to know is that it’s Steve with an image inducer)
They would begin at the Grand Canyon, Steve decided. It had been the mythical goal of their past lives together, so it could be the symbolic starting point of their new ones. Once upon a time, when they’d been boys in Brooklyn, it had seemed as strange and distant a place as they could imagine. China had been less foreign to them — they saw Chinamen every day, but they’d never met anyone from Arizona or knew anyone who had. It was the land of John Wayne and Tim McCoy, of stagecoaches and saloons and sagebrush, and it had been everything their lives hadn’t been and wouldn’t ever be.
(Steve had met McCoy during the war, first during his USO tours and then, later on, during his Commando days. McCoy had been a colonel in the Air Corps and had congratulated Steve on his getting in to the ‘real’ war and not staying content punching Hitler on stage. It had meant a lot to him at the time.)
Bucky, of course, was still not one for admitting to appreciating symbolism. “We’re both products of science,” he had said with a shrug when they’d presented their plan to the others. “Might as well see what nature can do.”
But Steve knew that Bucky understood. They couldn’t ever be the young men for whom seeing the American West would be a broadening of their horizons; they couldn’t have been those men even if they’d both come home after the war like they should have. This was putting those childhood dreams to rest and beginning to figure out what their new dreams would be. Figuring out who the men they had become really were and where they fit in a time and place that they couldn’t have ever imagined themselves to be.
The first picture they sent back was of the canyon, which was much more majestic than they could have imagined as boys or men. Steve took the picture because he was the one who was supposed to have the eye for that sort of thing, but Bucky supplied the caption. “Not bad for a hole in the ground.”
The second picture they sent back was from a deserted stretch of highway, a Steve-sized koala sitting on a Harley next to a sign that warned for animal crossing. Because as different as they were from the boys from Brooklyn, not everything had changed and Bucky was still able to get Steve to go along with his terrible (awesome) ideas.
[the koala comes from Revenant, but all you really need to know is that it’s Steve with an image inducer)
