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rambleonwaywardson · 22 days

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Sleepless

A Clegan (Buck x Bucky) one-shot

Summary: Buck and Bucky both struggle with nightmares after the war, but they help each other cope.

Word Count: 2380

Author's note: some hurt/comfort for you all with some fluff at the end. As before, I'm posting here for now, and if I manage to build up a small collection of Clegan drabbles I'll see about putting them on AO3.

Bucky can’t sleep. But he could sit and watch Gale sleep for hours.

They’ve been doing okay, since the war. They’ve had good days and bad days. Good nights and worse nights. Over time, something in both of their minds is slowly, slowly beginning to heal, and the frequency of worse is steadily decreasing. Bucky is proud to say that he can, on average, probably sleep through the night almost every day of the week now. It’s taking time, but he’s getting there. He thinks to himself that he should start keeping track: “nights since last nightmare that made me afraid to close my eyes again…”

Zero.

Tonight, unfortunately, had fallen into the worse category.

Sometimes, when he wakes up, he can’t even remember what he’d been dreaming about. Sometimes, he isn’t sure that he had a dream at all. Just a feeling, an unease, a fear. Something that grips his mind and soul and just refuses to let go, no matter how hard he tries to shake it off. Funny how in war, in a bomber plane under attack, in a POW camp, in a near-death experience, he didn’t notice the fear so much. It was there, sure; he felt it creeping around in the back of his brain almost every second. But it was rarely all-consuming, and he did his best to push it away. He had to keep going, after all. Had to survive, had to find Gale, had to look after his men, had to make it home. There wasn’t time to let the fear drown him. There wasn’t time to truly think about how terrible, how harrowing, his experiences were in the moment. For the most part, he just had to keep going.

Now, in the aftermath, the fear pops up seemingly out of nowhere and makes him feel sick. He finds that unfair. He’d made it. He beat all of the unbeatable odds and survived. He’d found his way home, made it back to Gale. He isn’t dead no matter how hard the world has tried to do him in. And this is what he gets: he gets to remember it all in clearer detail than he experienced it when it actually happened. He gets to be haunted by it.

He made it home, but part of him is still at war.

Sitting cross-legged on their bed in sweatpants and no shirt, Bucky rests his elbow on his knee and his chin in his hand. He takes a deep breath. It’s fucking unfair, but at least it’s getting better. At least this is only his first sleepless night in about a week. We can’t win all the time, huh?

Exhausted but unable, unwilling, to close his eyes again, he watches Gale in the dim light of the bedside lamp. It’s fucking unfair, but at least he has this.

Gale is still fast asleep, peacefully laying on his side with his hands tucked up under his head. Bucky’s actual angel in disguise. He loves the way Gale’s messy hair falls down over his forehead and his lips part ever so slightly. The way he curls his legs up towards his chest just the littlest bit. Bucky wants to wrap him up in his arms and hold on forever. He focuses on watching Gale’s breathing, the gentle rise and fall of his chest. It reassures him that, no matter what his unconscious mind tries to tell him, Gale is here. He’s the picture of health. He’s alive, and he’s all Bucky’s. He’s not about to get taken away in the blink of an eye. Gently, Bucky reaches out and strokes Gale’s soft hair. Gale smiles in his sleep, and it makes Bucky smile, too. He thinks to himself that he’d do everything over again if it meant he’d end up here.

When he pulls his hand away, Gale scrunches his brow and frowns. Bucky blinks, hand hovering in the air, waiting to see if Gale’s face will soften again. It doesn’t. Instead, Gale starts nervously clenching and unclenching his jaw. Bucky’s heart sinks and he reaches back out, places his hand on the side of Gale’s head again, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Gale’s breathing picks up, faster, faster. He screws his eyes shut tight and makes a soft, wounded sort of grunting sound as one of his hands curls into a tight fist under his face.

Bucky runs his hand reassuringly over his hair the way Gale likes when he’s awake, trying to calm him down. It takes a minute, but his breathing starts to slow again, and then his eyes flutter open, unfocused and glassy with worried sleep. He scrunches his nose unhappily.

“Hey,” Bucky says softly.

Gale’s eyes find his. He tries to smile, but it’s just not quite there. “Hey.” Slowly, he sits up, the sheets falling down away from his chest so they sit in his lap as he leans forward, hands on his knees. He’s wearing a thin light gray t-shirt, but under it Bucky can see the chain around his neck and the outline of dog tags swinging against the fabric. Bucky is wearing his, too. They still haven’t quite gotten out of the habit. Oddly enough, they both have found that they often sleep better with them on.

Gale scrubs at his face with one hand and brushes his hair back away from his eyes. He checks the clock on the bedside table. 3:30 AM. Looking over at Bucky, he frowns. His voice is low and gravelly from sleep and carries a sort of guilt that Bucky wants to whisk away. “Did I wake you?”

Bucky shakes his head as he picks at the fabric of his sweats. “Was already up.”

“Mmm.” Gale nods and looks down at his lap, takes a deep breath. “What was yours about?”

They’d started doing this recently. Talking about their bad dreams. For a long time, neither of them wanted to give voice to what was in their heads. They wanted to push it away, ignore it, move on. Didn’t want to bug each other with it, add more weight to the burdens they already carried. Lately, though, they’d found that at least briefly putting words to it, saying it out loud to someone who would understand, helped them move forward a little easier. Instead of weighing more heavily on each other, talking about it lifted some of the burden away.

Bucky scratches the back of his head and sighs. “I-” Shit. It never really got easier to talk about, though. “I jumped from the fort, you know? And they were shooting at me, but they didn’t get me. I was still there. But. I looked over.” He glances up at Gale, who is looking vaguely in the direction of Bucky’s dog tags. Bucky breathes. “I looked over, and you were there, too. And I saw you, and I called your name, but you wouldn’t answer me. You wouldn’t answer. And then, I saw that you were dead. Hanging from your chute. A bullet hole through your…”

Bucky trails off, like the breath was pushed all out of his lungs before he could say the last word. He shuts his eyes tight and smacks a fist against his knee. Then there’s gentle fingers on his hand. A thumb stroking over his knuckles. I’m here, the touch says. Bucky nods. He knows. He just wishes his brain would start believing it.

“Mine was about the kid Nazi in the woods,” Gale says. This was one of his more frequent dreams, about the kids who killed George, the kid who pointed a gun at Gale’s head. In the dream, Gale doesn’t give him the chance to run. Bucky knows it by now, but he lets Gale say it anyway. He squeezes Gale’s hand back. Neither of them are looking at each other. Sometimes it’s easier that way. “I shot him,” Gale breathes out. “A kid. Just a kid. And I shot him.”

When Bucky looks up again, Gale is looking right at him, his face a mess of sadness and resignation, searching for something, anything, to make it go away. Bucky leans forward and pulls him in close, wraps his arms around Gale’s shoulders. “You didn’t, though,” he whispers.

Gale nods. “And I’m here.”

“You wanna try to go back to sleep?” Bucky asks him. Gale just about scoffs, burying his face deeper in Bucky’s neck. Bucky laughs mirthlessly. “Yeah, me neither.” He pats Gale on the side and pulls away. “Come on.”

Hand in hand – a tether proving to each other that they’re there, they’re safe, they’re not alone – they walk out of the bedroom and to the kitchen, turning on the lights. Bucky makes a show of how painfully bright they are even as he eyes the liquor cabinet in the corner. Gale shakes his head wordlessly and guides him away from it. He’d been so nervous since they came home, since the nightmares started in earnest, that Bucky would turn to alcohol to numb the pain. Months later, Gale still makes every effort to make sure that doesn’t happen. He’s thankful every day that Bucky tries his best, and that he lets Gale step in as his moral compass when the nights get hard. Bucky has no idea where he’d be by now if Gale wasn’t here with him.

So instead, Bucky pushes himself up to sit on the kitchen counter, fingers tapping nervously on his thigh, while Gale goes about making tea. Bucky never used to like tea, but he isn’t allowed to have alcohol after a nightmare and Gale insisted that coffee wouldn’t help matters either. So he lets him make him tea, and eventually he had learned to like it simply because it came from Gale when he needed Gale most.

They don’t always wake up on the same nights. Often now, it’s one or the other at a time. And not all the dreams make it impossible to fall back asleep either, thank God. But sometimes, when they’re bad, they’ll wake each other up because they just can’t be alone. It’s an unspoken agreement: it doesn’t matter what they have going on or what time of night it is; if one of them needs the other, they’ll stay awake together. No exceptions. Every once in a while, though, like now, the night turns on both of them. Often, they barely talk on nights like these. Words tend to feel empty; they’ve all already been said. They just need to be. To touch, to feel, to breathe. They just need the closeness and the care. They need each other, and that has to be enough.

Gale hands Bucky a mug full of tea, and Bucky spreads his legs open so Gale can stand between them. Gale tries not to look too intently at the tags dangling over Bucky’s bare chest, and he raises his own mug. “Cheers.”

Bucky half smiles and raises his mug to clink against Gale’s before taking a sip, letting the comforting warmth run through his body. He closes his eyes for a moment and feels the heat radiating from Gale standing in front of him, so close they’re almost touching. When he turns his head and looks out the kitchen window, he can see stars. So many stars, a constant the past few years no matter where on the Earth he’s been. Everything is quiet. He drinks his tea.

After a while, Gale sets his mug on the counter and leans his forehead against Bucky’s shoulder. Bucky sets his mug down, too, and places his hand on the back of Gale’s head, running his fingers soothingly through his hair. Then, carefully, he slides down off the counter so they’re face to face, and Gale wraps his arms up over Bucky’s shoulders. Bucky rests his head against Gale’s, cheek pressed to soft hair. Gale is not particularly small, but Bucky is still bigger than him, and he takes comfort in being wrapped securely in his arms. Like somehow, Bucky can be a shield, protecting him from all of the bad things in his own head.

When Bucky starts swaying, Gale raises an eyebrow even though his face is hidden in Bucky’s neck. “What are you doing?” he mumbles.

“Dancing,” Bucky says matter of factly. It’s somewhat less convincing because he yawns in the middle of the word and has to say it again.

“Why are we dancing?”

Bucky lifts his head up, kisses Gale’s forehead, and leans back as much as he can so he can look him in the eyes. “Why not?”

Gale rolls his eyes, but he smiles. It’s small, but it’s real, and Bucky smiles back.

They dance all around the kitchen, first just swaying, going in circles to the music in Bucky’s head. Then Gale slips away to put a record on in the living room – it starts on Blue Skies, Bucky’s comfort song – and when he comes back Bucky grabs him by the waist and spins him around. Gale laughs even as he nearly loses his balance and grabs onto Bucky’s arms again. Neither of them are very good, and they’re even worse together, but they do it anyway. And soon they’ve stepped and turned and spun their way into the living room. Bucky has tried to lift and spin Gale around in the air no fewer than three times. Gale has tried to twirl Bucky to no avail, to the point of stepping on each other’s feet and stumbling into each other’s arms. Until eventually, they collapse onto the couch, half laying on one another, and their eyes are still tired but they’re brighter again.

Bucky crawls forward and kisses Gale softly, slowly, before laying his head on his chest. Gale rubs his hand up and down Bucky’s back, wondering how on Earth he isn’t cold. Gale hasn’t had much tolerance for cold since the Stalag. It feels bone-deep and he often finds himself shivering even when it’s warm, unless he has something covering his body. He takes comfort in the warmth of Bucky’s skin, though, lets it calm his senses as they match their breathing to one another.

The last thing Gale hears before he falls asleep is a whispered, “I love you,” and he smiles.

#someone give these boys a hug #please they deserve the world #masters of the air #mota #clegan #clegan fic #john egan #gale cleven #bucky egan #buck cleven #buck x bucky #gale buck cleven #john bucky egan #bucky x buck

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cozylittleartblog · 3 months

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cant tell you how bad it feels to constantly tell other artists to come to tumblr, because its the last good website that isn't fucked up by spoonfeeding algorithms and AI bullshit and isn't based around meaningless likes

just to watch that all fall apart in the last year or so and especially the last two weeks

there's nowhere good to go anymore for artists.

edit - a lot of people are saying the tags are important so actually, you'll look at my tags.

#please dont delete your accounts because of the AI crap. your art deserves more than being lost like that #if you have a good PC please glaze or nightshade it. if you dont or it doesnt work with your style (like mine) please start watermarking #use a plain-ish font. make it your username. if people can't google what your watermark says and find ur account its not a good watermark #it needs to be central in the image - NOT on the canvas edges - and put it in multiple places if you are compelled #please dont stop posting your art because of this shit. we just have to hope regulations will come slamming down on these shitheads#in the next year or two and you want to have accounts to come back to. the world Needs real art #if we all leave that just makes more room for these scam artists to fill in with their soulless recycled garbage #improvise adapt overcome. it sucks but it is what it is for the moment. safeguard yourself as best you can without making #years of art from thousands of artists lost media. the digital world and art is too temporary to hastily click a Delete button out of spite

#not art #but important #please dont delete your accounts because of the AI crap. your art deserves more than being lost like that #if you have a good PC please glaze or nightshade it. if you dont or it doesnt work with your style (like mine) please start watermarking #use a plain-ish font. make it your username. if people can't google what your watermark says and find ur account its not a good watermark #it needs to be central in the image - NOT on the canvas edges - and put it in multiple places if you are compelled #please dont stop posting your art because of this shit. we just have to hope regulations will come slamming down on these shitheads #in the next year or two and you want to have accounts to come back to. the world Needs real art #if we all leave that just makes more room for these scam artists to fill in with their soulless recycled garbage #improvise adapt overcome. it sucks but it is what it is for the moment. safeguard yourself as best you can without making #years of art from thousands of artists lost media. the digital world and art is too temporary to hastily click a Delete button out of spite

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