wintergaydar:

There’s a lot of temptation to erase someone’s flaws when you lose them. You forget their bad habits because you miss the sound of their voice. Their mistakes, no matter how serious, start looking trivial because you just wish that you could hear about their day one more time.

This is one reason people wind up getting back with exes, but it’s worse when you lose someone forever. The idealized version of your late loved one will crystallize in your mind if you let it, perfect forever, because the dead don’t make new mistakes.

I wonder, then, what it’s like for Steve to lose Bucky and to get him back again. Because Steve mourned Bucky: Steve went numb with grief for him and burned every Hydra base he could find to the ground for him, and put that plane in the ocean. And then Steve came back, still missing him, and had those long years, out of place in a new century, to think of all the wonderful things he missed about Bucky Barnes.

There was the way that Bucky dragged him into dance halls, bright-eyed and grinning, and grief would soften how much Steve hated being there and hated watching Bucky dance with someone else, so only the soft-focus memory of Bucky’s head thrown back and his body moving to the rhythm remained.

There was the way that Bucky took care of him, and grief could wipe away how much Steve resented that sometimes, and leave only the affection in Bucky’s eyes.

Grief would leave Bucky’s touch and his voice and his sense of humor and wipe away the way he snapped his fingers too much listening to the radio and how he’d snort when he laughed too hard and how mad Steve got at Bucky for flirting with everyone.

And then Steve gets Bucky back — a real boy, broken, but alive and brave and healing. And once they’re finally together again, Bucky’s not perfect anymore, because he can’t be: no one is.

Steve visits the goat farm, and Bucky slurps the stew they share so loudly, and he hogs the covers and clings in his sleep, and his hair gets in Steve’s mouth all the time, during everything. He’s traumatized, obviously, and he’s trying so hard to atone for things that aren’t even his fault. He sings baby goats to sleep in a low, soothing voice. He sends Steve photos and texts that make him laugh from across the world, on the run. When they’re together, he’s in Steve’s arms, in Steve’s space, about ninety percent of the time. Bucky is alive and real and so much better than anything Steve could have remembered or imagined, because perfect isn’t your lost person. Ideal pales in the face of real.