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vivelarevolution13 · 22 days

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the beloved name, exiled free verse poem (?) for @catws-anniversary, day 8 | april 2nd theme: bucky barnes | prompts: ghost story, memories, revenge | on ao3 here

Listen: this is a ghost story. Are you listening?

Good. Let me set the scene: here we are at the beginning of our path, here we are at the mouth of the river, still cool and smelling of salt and rotten fish and not gasoline. And here we have our protagonist who is like all other protagonists, which is to say he is handsome, maybe, or he used to be and he is young, maybe, or he used to be and he is unimportant and mundane and utterly human, maybe, or he used to be.

What about a name? This can get confusing, so let's call him Yuri or Yevgeny or Yakub, let's call him Joe or Jack or Jimmy— overplayed, overused, there's too many of those just running around all over the place, trust me. Let's just call him the universal name of all history, meaning let's not call him anything at all. Most of the real protagonists are nameless, and all history ever does is pile them atop each other, dead faceless weight on neat numbered lists, pour them out into shallow unmarked graves, send them home as bits of hammered metal and pairs of over-mended socks, meaning: 31 GOVT=WUX WASHINGTON DC 845PM 3-8-45

THE SECRETARY OF WAR DESIRES ME TO EXPRESS— Hello? Everybody home? Are you sitting down? Sorry for your loss, ma'am. Sorry about the caked blood on his boots, about all the ugly, festering parts that nestled in the chest and grew outwards, stretching towards the sun. You should probably make it a closed-casket funeral, you should probably make it a nice picture on the mantle, a gilded frame for grief, because you won't like the thing the search party digs up from the snow. Sorry for your loss, ma'am, truly, but know this: никто не забыт и ничто не забыто, meaning vechnaya pamyat, memory eternal, meaning we will forever honor your unnamed hero of a son on neat numbered lists and in the worn, earmarked pages of history. And don't that just beat all. Except for the ones that make it. Except for the rare ones deserving of a title, the ones left to carry history's weight, left to tell the story; left to be immortalized as the writing on the wall. They get to keep their names. You saw it, too. Not really, not the fleshy, messy parts between the syllables, not in a way that counts, and we're not here to talk about him, anyway. I'm the one calling the shots, I'm the one telling this story, so listen. If you say so. So we have our protagonist— tell me about the monster, then. Every good story needs a monster. Except I didn't say monster, did I, I said ghost: something caught in the doorway but never fully in either room, something that has a body which is never whole but always wants to be. The body which knows without knowing, which occupies the space between awareness and understanding; the nuclear shadow of longing.

But you don't want that, do you. You want something with clean-cut lines, something with teeth and a mean streak that adds up to more than just the disjointed sum of its parts. I don't blame you for that. So here: have your handsome young unnamed hero while he was still handsome and young and without the weight of a title for a name breaking over his back, sweating in summer heat. Have a scene drawn by a boy on a fire escape with a red-bellied bird over blue water that hasn't caught on fire yet; have a scene in which all the lights add up, in which there are no creeping shadows and the scenery makes sense.

Here is your kindhearted hero who walks tall and straight and shares his chocolate with the children sheltering in the basement of the shattered house, the thousands of children on whose bony backs the mythos of Leningrad was built— which is a thing our protagonist doesn't know then but will learn in time, with practice and repetition beaten raw into the skin: pain, the mother and father and inheritor of all earthly knowledge. And here is the monster which is, of course, a house with one too many locked doors, one too many broken windows and not enough light getting in to see his face clearly, to map into memory the places where the glittering armor's cracked, where the boy's expression bleeds into the bird on the page. The edges all crooked. The spine tilting to the side. The bird's not flying.

How can it, the boy who is not a boy but a man says, when its wing's broken? And our protagonist says: you're the artist here. Can't you make up a better story, for a change?

I'm sorry. I tried to keep it simple. Let me start over.

There's something about the house you're keeping out of the picture. How did they get in if all the doors are locked? Where did they come from? Where did the overlap come from? The other side of the river Lethe, maybe, except that's just another myth our protagonist doesn't remember learning but knows anyway. Head stuffed full of stories, passed on in hope and bread and blood head stuffed full of cotton, gasoline-soaked waiting decades for something to spark, except someone's cut the connecting strings, you see. Someone's hacked off the fuse. A lighter's useless if you can't even light a candle with it. A tool loses its value when it stops doing its job well, when it becomes nothing but the disjointed, disloyal sum of its parts and bites the hand wielding it, which is usually when the hand tends to get pissed. You know. I don't need to tell you this. The voltage wasn't high enough to burn out the fear of failure. If someone's cut the fuse, where's the flame coming from, then? Shut up, I'm getting there. We were talking about the scenery, about the roses next to the blown out window, pink on red on tablecloth white; we were talking about the dark-eyed girl in the basement with the one-sided dimple, the one-sided shyness, the handful of picked wildflowers when he walked back through the door, wanting to go back to a time when his body was a gentler sum of its parts.

What color were the wildflowers? Now you're getting somewhere. Pink, white, yellow; blue, maybe, the color of kindness. That is what they were fighting for, you understand, one and all: a kinder world, a world where little girls never end up hungry in basements again. That's what they were told over and over again by the same men in different suits.

I know what you're about to ask. No, the children never got out of the basement, and yes, the girl's eyes were blue back then, not brown a mirror of belonging, and in another version of events her hair was red, but that's a story for a different time. And the world? Well. Depends on who you ask. Anyway, we were talking about the boy on the fire escape and the boy in the shattered house drawing the same bird. Mythology carries weight even without proof of it ever happening, but this is different. Is it? What makes you say that? Well the birds looked alike, and the two boys didn't look alike at all except for all the ways in which they did, the lip caught between teeth and the line cutting between brows and the soft scritch-scritch-scritch of stubby pencil on cheap paper, a faint looping sound that should've driven our protagonist mad but didn't. Echo of a life repeated, of a sound as familiar as his own heart, which is the closest thing to proof of existence you can get. I beat, therefore I exist. I am beaten, therefore: there's still something permanent about this body that can't be taken away.

The boy's body wasn't permanent, or at least it turned out malleable despite its innate unbreakability, despite the hard-earned slouch of the shoulders and the same old broken nose and the twist to the mouth; not smiling, but close. The eyes; not looking at, but not looking away.

Maybe it's not the boy that changed, but the looking. Maybe that's the part the protagonist made up after: the looking back. Explain the flame then, explain the devil in the details, explain the hunger cutting through the ribs, spilling the contents out into the world to be pecked at. If none of it was real, explain how all this light is getting in. Oy vey iz mir, I'll never get to the end if you keep this up. You sure ask a lot of questions, don't you? I don't like when you do that, just repeat words you heard once or twice— or a thousand times. Isn't that all storytelling is? Do you even know what they mean? Do you? They mean, enough already They mean, didn't I tell you to buzz off? They mean you've been at the wheel too long but I've been here longer, so let me talk for once, let me set some roots down in this shifting landscape you're running from and be more than just a collection of wild old hungers. I thought you said this is a ghost story. That's all ghosts ever are.

I'm not talking about me, I'm talking about our hero and I'm just trying to prove a point here, anyway. I'm trying to say maybe the birds weren't the same bird, maybe the bird wasn't even a bird and maybe the boy was something he made up, too, clinging onto hope like a thing with too many feathers, like a rope that could very well hang him. Maybe it's still enough on its own, anyway, the feeling that flutters through at the not-story, a robin's broken wing against the windowsill, the aftermath of a struggle; tender and violent and utterly unkillable. Sounds like a nice story. So why are you so angry?

Am I? Well, fear can sometimes cause an irrational reaction. Fear can make people dangerous, make them behave unpredictably. This is all empty rhetoric, of course, but you should understand. You're not people, either. Your lethality is not irrational. It's been hammered into a precise shape, like all things born out of a binary are— I know this story, too. It goes: Yes or no. Success or failure. Dot or dash. You finger's on the trigger: you pull it or you don't. What's your choice? Report. Never mind, I don't want to talk about this.

Report status. Dot or dash? The choice of a small, bloody animal backed into a corner, which is to say no choice at all. The choice of go fuck yourself with the constant interruptions, I was telling a story here.

That's not one of the options. Your finger is still on the trigger. The house is still on fire. What do you save? What are you trying to pull? You know how this story goes so why rehash it why poke at infected tissue, why— Because you won't talk to me plainly, you won't look at the thing head on, because I'm trying to be helpful, like I've always tried to be helpful, because the story goes: We want to help you, you have to let us help you, you have to let us, so: report. I was getting there, why did you have to— Report. Answer the question. You know, sometimes I think you liked it when they— Sometimes I think you like getting— Answer. Sometimes I think you— .-. . .--. --- .-. - two GSWs one to the stomach one to the thigh critical condition - .... -.-- / .-- .. .-.. .-.. / -... . / -.. --- -. . broken ribs shattered cheekbone pneumo thorax 32557038 you’ve known me your whole life exfil at 38° 46' 57.50" -77° 00' 54.22" you hear that assholes home by christmas and lying dead asleep on the couch lying dead sinking in the water lying strapped to a table when война закончена, слава героям Красной армии subject uncooperative try it again 32557038 sergeant 191 pts in most recent drill recommendation for additional training 3255 --- -. / . .- .-. - .... / I said .- ... / .. - / .. ... try it again / .. -. / .... . .- ...- . -. he’s still talking 7038 initial report stated the body pulled from the Potomac was nonresponsive stated subject’s cardiac arrest lasted 176.83 seconds so try it again stated edelweiss, ein kleines edelweiss stated I give thanks before you for you have mercifully returned my soul within me stated 32557—

.-. . .--. --- .-. - Record skip. There's fuzz on the damn needle again. Where's it keep coming from? What was I talking about, again? You were about to tell me where the light keeps coming from. The light is irrelevant, the light casts shadows that don't make any sense, I told you, the light's just there for dramatic effect. Our protagonist is not an artist, he's not thinking about the light.

You're lying. You're leaving the important parts out again. You're ignoring what's happening in the house, you're ignoring the red string that's supposed to be leading the way, time-adherent. Of course. That's because all strings can be cut, all strings can wind up dead ends, all things can be taken away, including time. The string's not red because of the poetry of it all, bub. It's red because someone's bled all over it. We both know this, so what's the point in reopening old wounds? That's how people hemorrhage. That's how the needle starts to skip. That's not how stories work. Why won't you tell me what he's thinking about? Fine. Fine then: he's thinking about the damn light, how it makes him look all translucent and tired and too human this man that used to be a boy that used to be a David long before they turned him into a Samson, and he tries not to think about how that story ends. He thinks about the light and he wants to say, keep your temples standing—the world's had more than its fair share of heroes and legends, and look where that got us. Nothing good ever came from making a fallible man a myth. He wants to say: if there's someone who could knock them down blind it'd be this boy, but he'd rather look at him in this ghost light until the day he bites it than read his name in history books and over the tombstone of a hero's grave.

He wants, but that's not something fit to send back with the socks and the hammered metal, that's about as useless as crying over spilt milk, about as useless as the thoughts that lead nowhere but deeper into the pit our hero keeps crawling out of. And so he goes back to the numbers and the angles, to the sounds right outside the door, to the piece of metal in his hands because he was always so much better at that kind of thing, anyway. Things that can be taken apart and put back together, new from the old; things that can be forced into a form or a binary are so much easier to control. You know this, too. You're living, breathing proof of it.

Anyway, that's what he's thinking about at that time: speed, math, probability. Gravity, maybe. He drifted— wandered— walked purposefully so close to the edges of this man that he ended up wanting inside him, close enough to know him like his blood knows him, close enough to get warm and to shield from the draft through the broken windows snuffing the light out of them both. He'd ended up afraid of pushing too hard and ending up on the other side of him, afraid of falling off one hell of a cliff. And the boy who hasn't been a boy in a while looked at him and said, Are you— and our man with no face said: Let's not do this again. And they both carried on dealing with things easier to handle, like smart numbers and smart maps and smart hands that did things they were good at but tried not to think about too hard at night.

He still ended up falling, of course. And then, well— a shot bird can't fly if its wings've been broken, a shot bird can't fly if its been fucking shot.

Someone lied to our protagonist, you see. It was a long time ago, but it still stuck.

But what about the light?

Why the rush? Look, whichever end I tell the story from, we'll end up at the foot of the same cliff, the same river. I just don't know what more you want from me.

I want you to stop dropping the thread, I want you to stop playing dead already— that shattered house is on fire, and you keep trying to put it out with buckets full of bullet holes while I'm not looking and the water's all gone before you can even see it evaporate. The house is still on fire, the house is caught in a thunderstorm too many charged particles too close to the eye socket and the smell of crackling ozone and burning flesh and you need to get out— That's enough. Change the topic, I'm not doing this again. Please. Look, I'm being nice about it. Fine. Do you remember who first told our unnamed hero that old Lie? No, but it starts like this: dulce et decorum est, except there's nothing decorous about flies on too-thin bodies, about the taste of fear like iron at the scraped roof of the mouth, about the things you saw your hands do; there's nothing about our hero that makes him a hero. Blood under the fingernails. White little petals high up in the pale mountains, white little petals on lapels, crushed to bits. You still remember how brown his eyes were, how young how quick the light behind them was snuffed out when all your muscles locked up, animal instinct. Mind you, it wasn't unwarranted— the motherfucker's knife was in your stomach. The pretty pale mountains were a screen for a world set on raging fire. Mind you, this was before the invention of a gun out of living flesh, before they gave you a title instead of a name. You were bleeding then, too.

I thought we were talking about the story.

We are, pay attention: Do you remember when you first realized the awful Truth? I know you don't, but it goes like this: you don't remember giving your life and you don't remember believing in something bigger than yourself, but your trigger finger does. Picturebook blue and gold over the river's surface, stretching yourself too thin towards the sun. Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori. (Only one part of this sentence is a lie.)

You still haven’t told me where the light is coming from. And you still haven't told me why you want the answer so bad. I don't know. Is that what you've been wanting to hear? I don't know. You don't want to know. There's a difference. You're scared shitless is what you are, you sorry old thing. Falling back on old habits. I want to know how our protagonist ends up.

I’m working on it, alright. The road is long and potholed and roundabout and the story’s not much better, you see: the pictures are all there but the colors are too bright, the linework's all off, I still can't get the shadows to make any goddamn sense. Too many different mythologies, I think; too much static on the channel to pick the thread of the drama up clearly, and someone keeps cutting the transmission lines, anyway. It's downright sabotage, is what it is. Friendly fire. But our protagonist is getting weary, he needs a moment to lay his head down, so let me wrap up, will you, let me get a word in edgewise and put it in a way you will understand. Stop asking questions and let yourself sit in the house with one too many doors that you didn't notice before, one too many rooms and not enough hallways to connect them all. Make a place for yourself by the warmth of the fire in the burning house, and pay attention:

The doors are there for a reason. Did you hear what I said? Have you been listening? Someone's cut all the strings. Someone's left them to smolder in the ash, someone's bitten the hand that used to hold them raw, and now the monster's asking questions. Now the monster's off its leash, and it wants what all angry, abused abandoned things want, which is someone to be afraid of it for once, which is a way out of the maze, a clear path into the sunlight. It wants its due. I thought you said it was a ghost. Gimme a break— there's no place for semantics in this discussion, there's no place for a discussion at all. I'm telling you now: ghost, monster they're all just different words to say— something that's other, something on the outside looking in, something with no belonging. All different words to say: something that used to be something else once.

That's why our hero is no hero, you see: no Samson, no Oisín, no Theseus; at best, he's the minotaur. At worst, he's the ship. Something new from something old, over and over until it's unrecognizable. A gilded frame for grief masquerading as an honor. That's where the light is coming from, you understand. That's where all the strange old hunger is coming from: the blue of the wildflowers carved into bone; the beloved name exiled to the other side of the river Lethe. That's what the monster wants. A way back home. Monsters don't get to make demands. Only heroes do. You think? You still haven't figured it out yet, have you? You're still thinking in binaries. Who do you think I've been flapping my gums at all this time, who do you think our tired nameless protagonist with all that blood on his boots is? And who's the one out of the two of us here asking all the goddamned questions? Open your eyes. Put your ear to the ground. Listen: I lied. This isn't a story. This is a warning. Someone's cut all your red strings and that someone was you, pushed out of a century of quiet by the wrong dead body in the wrong burning river and a feeling you didn't understand in the shape of a name cutting your ribcage open to the sun; which is why you're so angry, which is why you're scared shitless, which is why you've got more questions than answers. The needle's still skipping, so we’re flipping the whole thing over to B-side. Can you hear it? Can you mouth along to the crackling words? It seems to me you've heard that song before, so: wipe the record and start over. Maybe this time the melody'll actually stick.

And then? And then, you get your due. No gods, no mythologies, no more fucking stories, just this: you, blowing up the burning house and clawing your way out into the sunlight.

#catws10 #catws anniversary #bucky barnes #poetry #if you define poetry very very loosely #my fic #bucky barnes fic #stevebucky

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