“If it’s going to make you feel inadequate, I’ll only show you the little penises I’ve been working on,” Steve promises, a brightness to his voice. They can’t pretend everything is all right again but they can both feel good about what this might be.

With the tine set and the place decided on, Steve finishes his burger, takes another for the walk home, and leaves Bucky to his thoughts. It’s a long night for Steve. He can’t sleep, he’s too wound up and too grateful to have Bucky back, and after the nightmares come (mostly where he’s unable to catch Bucky from falling off of a cliff or a train or a building), sleep is out of the question.

He paints instead. He has a damaged canvas half his size set up in the living room behind the sofa and though he’d been doing a still life of Natasha’s ruined, marked up toe shoes she always leaves on the floor, he spreads gesso over the half finished work and sketches something else. It’s more abstract, a moonscape really, a splotch of dark colors and stark white that overlap his feelings.

He might be tired in the morning, but by the time one thirty rolls around, the classroom is empty and Steve has set up two placemats on the back table so that they can share cheese fries and a few slices of pizza among the penises and breasts.