#he couldn't afford therapy and chose the next best thing

[chaos-bringer-13]

@void-of-unparalled-chaos did you see me going through Epic the musical tag on your blog? It's because you infected me. I am no longer sane. Because of you posting about Epic I went and watched both streams recordings on youtube and am currently making my way through literally every video about Epic on Jay's channel. I am obsessed. I ranted to my parents for an hour and then started sending memes to my friend who barely has any context. I am vibrating through walls. There is something fundamentally changed in me now. I am losing my sense of humanity. Please if you ever want to infodump and have someone to share your freaking out - message or tag me. I need to know every single detail and I'm too bad at noticing the motifs and instruments myself. Someone save me

[stuckyfingers]

I wish I had the motivation to write a 300k for this but here's the first chap ig 😭😭

Sarah Rogers was the most amazing and hardworking mother Steve could ask for- but even at the age of 34, the image of an art school brochure and a broken plate with spaghetti all over the floor, flashed before his eyes as he graded Labor Law papers.

It had been on a night of the last week of his senior year that he saw a side of his mom that he'd rarely ever seen before: and it was because she was breaking into pieces after seventeen long years of pulling it together for him.

He knew she was right. Painting and sketching wasn't a real job. There was no way he was not going to be trapped in debt for the rest of his life if he didn't find something that paid better than that.

And yet... he still expected that she would have just refused and given him another stern lecture about money. Instead, she began screaming so loud that the neighbors came knocking- so venomously that for a whole 24 hours after that, he still had trouble processing that it was directed at him. The one alleged joy of her life.

He hadn't considered himself spoilt, but that's what she had called him that night. She said he didn't deserve his friends, who certainly egged him on to be an artist - because it wouldn't make a difference to them if his life was destroyed or not.

Steve realized that he had been reading the same line over and over again with blurring vision as he dissociated.

Why am I thinking about this now?

Why indeed? He left everything like that behind that very week. He put his mind on the LSATs in the next few months and the rest was history- he earned enough to rent a nice apartment in Brooklyn and pay half his loans in just five years. Hell, he could even afford hospital bills and his medication now. Life was good.

But life was not happy. He tried to drown the peripheral emptiness of it all, in paperwork and assignments and fun activities with students. But he couldn't escape how there was a hole in his heart. A metaphorical one, although he also had a literal one.

A Bucky shaped hole.

Or maybe like, two Bucky shaped holes if you want to go there.

But Bucky had been his best friend- middle to high school, seven years straight. They shared so many things: interests, firsts, clothes, homework. Even a bed.

And they broke up even before they became a thing. It was like something crashing into a plane inside a hangar; it was technically a plane crash, but not in the way you imagine.

Steve remembered that too. He had cut off any communication with Bucky one fine morning, which was made convenient by the fact that high school was over. He had needed to let go of the fun things and focus on what he owed his mom. He needed to do what was practical.

He was now almost rich enough to fix the medical hole in his heart. And that's because he chose reality. Right?

His pen had made a perfect circle of ink where it had absently rested on a page, throughout the twenty minutes of his dissociation. There were other, more transparent wet circles on the page, which he realized were his tears. Blood rushed to his face in embarrassment as he jerkily began blotting the moisture off the page.

get yourself together.

His friends told him to get therapy. Sam Wilson was always one for that. The decorated veteran-turned-laid back college counsellor was one of the few reasons he didn't spiral into loneliness every week. Sam had revealed to him that under the handsome, funny guy behind the counsellor's desk, were neat piles of sanity as well as horrors in which he'd compartmentalize his trauma and process life through a perspective that he'd built from years of therapy.

And Steve took Sam seriously on that. He just didn't think he was that traumatized. Sam had literally watched his friend die in combat. Steve on the other hand had used one phone call to throw away the deepest friendship he'd ever had. It was embarrassing to act like he didn't have it easier than Sam or his mom.

And my flashbacks never interfere with my work. I can still function, right?

He shouldn't have said that.

The very next day, as he was heading to hand out the graded papers to his class- he saw something that got him rushing back into his office before he broke down behind the slammed door.

The new art professor was so handsome.

The new art professor was Bucky.

he teaches law he teaches art

stucky professors au