hiraeth

- A quote about taking a step forward because there’s no other option from The White Book by Han Kang
- A quote about not being able to go back because the hurts are too deep to be mended from Peter Jackson’s Lord of The Rings: The Return of the King
- A quote about everyone housing a multitude of lifetimes and identities within themselves from Roman Year by André Aciman
- A quote about the difficulty of accepting past decisions you regret from Unknown Pleasures by Peter Hook

The problem with leaving was that as soon as you took that one step forward, you could no longer return. Not to that moment. Not to the person you were before that decision. 

For the longest while, Steve had clung to the idea that as long as he looked over his shoulder so that the past remained in his sightline, he could find his way back no matter how far he moved away from it. But movement meant change. Even a rock left in stillness on an untouched field wasn’t the same rock it was the day before, the week before, the year before. There was no defense against the elements. Against time. 

Three months after emerging from the ice, Steve had run to Brighton Beach, fleeing the streets that were jarring in their unfamiliarity and familiarity to dependable, enduring nature, and had been disconcerted to discover that like the rest of Brooklyn, the shoreline itself had been remade.

Erosion, then something called beach nourishment, he found out through Google. 

So he knew that even with the power to drop himself into a specific moment—to any moment he wanted—he couldn’t pick up where he had left off as though he had simply hit pause and was pressing play again. Even if everything were exactly as it had once been, he had changed too much. He was that rock in the field, that shoreline. He’d had no intention of doing anything but remaining what he was, but time had weathered him and whittled him into something else regardless.

He thought he understood that well when he made his choice. He wasn’t trying to go back; he was trying to go someplace it didn’t matter when or how he showed up. To go to someone who made sense of the world and of him, someone who recognized him and took him as he was no matter what happened and no matter what form he took. To Peggy. 

To Peggy, every version of him was him and that was all there was to it; she never had to explain because it was the same the other way. When Steve sat next to her bed in the nursing home, holding her frail hand as she regaled him with her adventures, he found that he still knew her.

It was enough to have her at all, and it could be enough if they had each other now. That was what was important. He could count on Peggy to see that. Always could on the important things. 

She agreed.

“You came back to me,” she said more than once in the days after he had found her. “You came back,” she would say, and it was an echo of the same astonishment she had had when he found her the first time, old and gray but still very much Peggy.

So he had hoped that it would be enough that they were recognizable to each other even if they weren’t what they used to be—this life, Peggy, him—and some days, he was content to believe it was. But he hadn’t come back, not really, not to the life he once knew, not as the person he once was, and he found that they couldn’t help but search for someone else somewhere else. 

He knew the expression on Peggy’s face during those moments because it was a mirror of what he imagined he must have looked like as he took in the strangeness of a New York that was his and wasn’t in the next century.

Maybe this would have been easier when he had first woken up. He would have given anything to go back then, to all that he left behind. Now, he had gone back because there was no other choice, because nothing remained. 

In another 2012, his younger self had let go of him, forgetting his anger, forgetting everything, when Steve had told him that Bucky was alive.  

“What?” he had breathlessly asked.

His mouth had been so close to Steve’s ear that Steve could have almost imagined he had thought it himself had it not been for the fact that that old pain had altered its shape over eleven years too. His younger self had only lost Bucky and his world once and thoroughly believed in the finality and immutability of that loss.

Maybe this life was for that Steve. 

Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference that that Steve had become someone else, however briefly, because that singular grief that had so transformed him would have no reason to continue existing. It couldn’t be undone, but it would be nullified and a swift end would be the next best thing to the loss not happening in the first place. 

Maybe that Steve wouldn’t have had time to become so foreign, the hurts not set yet and the ones to follow in the coming years never to occur, so Peggy wouldn’t brush the lines at the corners of his eyes that hadn’t been there when she had last seen him and ask him sadly what happened in their years apart.

Wouldn’t ask who had left him, for him to make this odyssey alone, how it came to be that he was a half-stranger to her. 

Or maybe it had always been too late. 

Maybe even if that Steve went back, he would find himself looking over his shoulder, to that future he had been a part of, however briefly, because it had already taken hold of him. Because all of this, the life after the war, had already happened and it was in that future that he had gotten to see that there was room for him, the person he now was.

Maybe that Steve couldn’t abandon Bucky after learning his changed fate because going back wouldn’t save Bucky, just a different version of him. 

Maybe he would stay, would remember what it felt like to see Tony come back from death and think what a miracle it was, what a miracle he was. 

The sun glittered on the skyscrapers; the sun came up in those warm brown eyes looking up at him, and Tony had asked about shawarma and Steve had no clue what he was saying except this time, he realized he was in on the joke, he was included, had realized Tony had had his hand outstretched all this time, even if he had tried to hide it by poking and prodding, scared of rejection just as Steve had expected rejection. And it felt like a homecoming, like the victory and rest that had eluded him since he joined the war, seeing him wake up, hearing him fill up the dead air with life, with life. And now the war was over, now it was time for something else to begin.

The future was bright and limitless. He could tell Tony about Bucky right then and there and they could win. For once, they could win and keep everything, and he could keep Tony.

Because time couldn’t mend the past, but the future existed outside of time. The future couldn’t be ravaged by it because it wasn’t yet written, because it was a boundless promise, and what a gift that was. The man who would see its preciousness and go after it was the real master of space and time, not him, not anyone who held the Stones. 

But what did he know? 

He was another man, a separate person from all his past selves. He couldn’t begin to guess what that Steve would do or think. He could only approach this as the person he was now, a man who understood the past could never be undone and was no longer his to belong to, who knew that there was no such thing as return, that he could never return, but made the journey anyway. Because refuge was refuge to the stranded, even if it was a home for someone else, because a haunted house was a house nonetheless, however insubstantial, however spectral, its bones. And this would be enough even if it wasn’t enough, for a man so changed that he fit nowhere.

"Now I’m going to tell you everything. I must get it off my chest. I’ve already told an angel in heaven, now I have to tell an angel on earth, too. You’re my angel on earth. You’ll listen to me, judge me, and forgive me… What I need is for someone higher than myself to forgive me." — The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Tony couldn't give it to him and neither could Pepper.

"It's my fault as much as it's yours," she had said when he went to her, and Steve had wanted to shout at her that she was wrong. Had wanted to shout at her to shout at him, to demand that she pass judgment on him, to hate him, instead of smiling at him sadly like she understood.

"If I didn't go to Tony with our plan," he had said desperately.

"If I didn't tell Tony to go ahead with his plan," she had replied.

He wanted to be hurt, wanted to be hurt by her—because only she could hurt him the way he needed to be hurt, because that hurt would be the only thing that made sense in a world that no longer made any sense—but she refused.

"I can't give you what you're looking for," she had said, and Steve had wondered who could, then, when the answer came to them, more alive than the resurrected world they had made, more alone than the dead world they had left behind, and the question changed from who to when.

One day, he would tell Morgan "We did this for you," and he would tell her everything. He would lay his fault, his failings, at her feet; he would kneel in front of her.

He would wait for her sword to swing down, pardon or punishment, for what they had done to her.

“Blue Steel’s right. If you’re going to make a bad decision, let me be your bad decision. Don’t text your ex.”
---
“I saw the note you left on the fridge, and I got to thinking about what you said last night. You were the right decision. That’s why I’m calling you.”

I didn’t realize this until I was about to post it, but “Pyriscence” is a nice bookend because it marks the end of an era with Endgame being a farewell to the past decade of the MCU and because my first fic ever in the Marvel fandom and on AO3 also had a one-word title dealing with nature (and warmth). It feels unintentionally poetic in a way, because those are the only fics with one-word titles other than the Warrior ficlet, or maybe I’m getting a little sentimental and overthinking things. 

It just made me reflect on what I’ve written these past several years and how, or whether, my writing has evolved since then. I feel like I’m missing the sense of rhythm I used to have back when I first started out to some extent, but maybe that’s because those fics were shorter so that was easier to accomplish. Now I’m able to write long fics! I’ve been writing longer things, which isn’t a thing that I was sure was possible even though I used to write pages and pages when I was a kid (but the stories were very bad lol). It’s not a struggle to do that and I don’t get writer’s block as much as I used to. 

And I’m able to write MCU Tony! I can write from his POV, and I can write him talking for more than a few lines! I still have a long way to go in terms of capturing his wit and energy, but to cut myself some slack, I’ve also been putting him in extremely difficult, sad situations. I’ll see how things go if I write less angsty things, but I used to be so daunted by him so I’m happy that I’ve gotten more comfortable with writing him.

Anyway, I’m in the mood to write which seems to happen a lot nowadays when I post something, but I don’t know what. Endgame is almost here which is a terrifying thought because I’m afraid of what the future holds for the fandom especially considering how long I’ve been in it and how much it’s been an enormous and integral part of my life. I don’t know if I should start anything now because I’m afraid I’m going to lose my motivation after watching the movie, I’d want to change things in the story or stories, or I’d want to write something else entirely based off of the movie.