Work Text:
Steve’s grip on the pencil relaxed slowly as he sketched. Long light pencil strokes cascaded down his paper portraying golden locks. He drew a familiar face, one he knew well from the countless stolen moments spent staring. He knew every detail, from the trim of his beard to the lines that would fold through his skin when he furrowed his brow.
Steve thought maybe it had been too long, too long since he’d drawn the face, too long since he’d even seen it, but the moment his pencil touched the page, every flicker of doubt disappeared. He knew every cut and bruise that had been on his face when he left, every hair out of place from the slight breeze, and every spot of dirt left on his skin.
Steve had started with the eyes, deep-set, blue and beautiful as he remembered them, but hostile and sharp on the page, the corners agressive, the pencil marks too dark. Steve began to erase them. As he continued drawing, the strokes had become lighter and softer, the act of sketching draining the tension from his body. Or maybe it was the act of sketching him.
He began to redraw the eyes. Steve would never admit it, but he missed him. He missed the golden locks and the deep-set, blue, beautiful eyes. He missed the rare smile and low laughter that seemed to emanate sunshine. Steve frowned, erasing what he’d drawn again. He’d never get it right. He closed his eyes and pictured them, wrinkling as he laughed, the pale skies vast in his irises, that bright sunshine that escaped him only when he smiled shining through his pupils.
He began to draw again, the rounded happiness in the eyes of the sketch contrasting the frown he’d drawn earlier. Steve’s wistful smile disappeared and he glared at the page again again. Now they were out of place. He erased them again. Instead, he set his pencil on the hair, sketching in a braid. He moved to the jaw and the cheekbones, perfecting the lines. He worked on the ears, the nose, and the background of bright green grass and the Avengers compound he sat in as he sketched. He drew over the lips, the beard, the hair, and the worn, dirty, red cape, torn from battle. He modified every piece of the drawing for hours until there was no difference between what he had drawn and what came to his mind as soon as he shut his eyelids. Besides the eyes.
He drew and erased the eyes over and over again until his paper was covered in the marks and raw from the friction of his his eraser. He sighed and closed his eyes again, letting himself picture him. He pictured the storms the seemed to brew in his eyes when he frowned, he pictured the dark color they shifted to and the sunshine that receded far too quickly.
Steve began to draw again. This time he was getting it right. He drew the quiet anger. He drew what hid behind the nonchalant attitude and the casual jokes, the storm that lived deep within the clouds. He drew the quiet, rumbling, thunder and the barely visible strikes of lightning. He drew the death of the man’s brother and the lies of his father, and he drew the loss of his mother. It was the rolling thunder, and the soft anger that kept him from smiling, but it was also the drizzling rain, the sorrow Steve had never noticed, but had somehow always related to.
Steve set the pencil down and leaned back in his chair, surveying the finished drawing. It looked just like him. Or at least just like Steve’s memory of him. The memory composed from stolen seconds that would no doubt amount to hours if he tried to add them up.
He looked at the eyes in the sketch once more, drawn turned away from him, as they almost always were. Just as he couldn’t quantify the amount of time he’d spent staring, he would never be able to count the number of times he’d been staring at Thor turned away from him. The same way he could never tally the occasions when his heart raced for Thor, who never bat an eyelid. Exactly like the way he couldn’t determine just how often his pulse had sped and sweat had glossed over his forehead at the feeling of being inches from Thor, who barely noticed he was even there.
Thor had managed to make him feel small again, and somehow unnoticed, even when Steve hadn’t been able to feel anything but abnormally large and conspicuous since 1942. It was about as refreshing as it was heartbreaking. Steve had never liked the attention, but he wouldn’t mind Thor’s- he wouldn’t mind the attention from the one person who made him feel like he’d never had it.
Steve stared at his sketch of Thor once more, the golden locks, the worn cape, the bruised and battered skin. The eyes, sorrowful and stormy and dark as thunderclouds that hid blinding sunshine. The eyes that never seemed to look back at him. Steve shut his notebook.
Both men stood on the Rainbow Bridge, only a number of steps away from the bifrost, which would undoubtedly take Thor back to Midgard, if he asked. Thor stared into the endless fibers of color in the platform, forming a spectrum beneath his feet. Heimdall, who stood next to him in silence, only looked forward into space. They stood at the doors of the observatory, Thor lost in thought, Heimdall waiting for the question he knew Thor craved to ask.
A beautiful scape of the stars surrounded them, nebulas in a gradient from dark orange to bright teal following them until a white light rested over the silhouette of Asgard, and still Thor could only manage to stare into the ground. “You might try looking at the stars for once while you think.” Heimdall commented.
Thor only nodded in acknowledgement, still not lifting his head. He’d seen it a thousand times, just as he’d seen the golden spears of the palace and the blue toned mountains dusted with snow framing the city. He hadn’t missed seeing it in a long time. Not as much as he suddenly missed Midgard. He hoped maybe if he stared into the ground long enough he’d be able to picture what he really wished to see.
“Heimdall, if you don’t mind telling me, how is Captain Rogers?”