Who Am I? » [Stucky]

36. Deception

"So do you want to go for a drink or something?" Sharon asked quietly, standing over Steve with her blazer draped over her arm, her eyes at the floor.

Steve had been wrapped up in his all-consuming despair for a whole hour. He hadn't once looked up, he hadn't once stopped crying and he hadn't once spoken a word. Another part of his world had come crumbling down around him, crashing to the floor in tatters and flames.

What words were there to say?

Steve lifted his distraught tearstained face from his warm hands, his blond hair crumpled and messy from where his hands had been stuffed in it, tugging and tearing and his eyes were heavily lidded and lazy from all of the crying he had been doing. He looked exhausted and his face was smeared with length red lines from where the tears had run. His hands were slick with the tears that he had cried and he wiped them on his lap.

"Fine," he grunted hoarsely.

He gave a large suffocated sniff and wiped away the last of the bawling lamented tears before rising to his feet with an unsteady sway; wobbling back with his centre of gravity off balance - all of the crying had made him exceedingly dizzy, like he had just taken sleeping pills. He felt like he was suffering from a clogging flu; his head full and heavy, his sinuses blocked and his nose runny. His breathing kept catching and his vision was scrambled; only colours and outlines clear until he forced his eyes to work.

Sharon took a slow pace as she walked away. She let out a large weighty sigh and then followed her like a lost puppy, unsure of what to do with himself.

~

"How did you to meet?" Sharon asked solemnly, her lips brushing the side of the crystal glass of whiskey.

"When I got signed up to the army, Peggy was the squadron leader," Steve retold the story fondly, a smile briefly tugging one corner of his mouth into shape; but that happiness was ripped out from him the moment he remembered that she was gone; and gone for good.

"She didn't talk about the army much. She did when I was younger... When she could remember, I suppose..." Sharon's eyes dropped to the bar again.

"She terrified me the first time I saw her... Some guy in our squadron tried chatting her up and I remember she told him to step forward and then socked him square in the jaw. The guy dropped to the floor and when he got back up again he had a bleeding nose," he fondly remembered. The smile made a reappearance. "I'm so sorry that you lost her tonight..." He sighed.

"Hey... Don't be like that. We both lost her, not just me," she promised, placing a hand over his and looking deep into his eyes. He gazed back and forced a crooked smile at the sweet gesture. He gave her a hard done by nod of appreciation.

"I was so selfish... I hogged her during her last moments. You didn't even get to say goodbye..." He drifted off back into his mind from merely an hour ago and stared right through her as if she wasn't even there. He stared down into his glass, trying to look away from her so he wouldn't have to see her disappointed face. He had let her down - or so he thought - and he hated letting people down. He had let too many people down.

"You didn't know they were going to be her last moments. Neither did I. No one could have known... It's the way she would have wanted it. She died happy... And now her suffering is over," Sharon tried to make the best of a bad situation.

Peggy's lengthy ordeal with cancer hadn't been pleasant; especially when the Alzheimer's kicked in. She was in pain and scared and confused most of the time. She took peace of mind in knowing that her prolonged pain was over and she didn't have to hurt anymore. It had been horrible for her to experience and just as bad for her family to watch as her memory slowly crumbled to dust and her body gave up on her.