I don't own it.
Voting is still open for which story you'd like me to post next! Your options are:
Option 1: Berlinterview. Civil War alternate take on the Bucky Interrogation scene. Dialogue- and character-heavy with an action epilogue covering the fallout. 28,000 words, 10 chapters. Bucky and Steve centric with support from Tony, Sam, Nat, and T'Challa.
Option 2: Barton, Undercover. A 5+1 fic based around the idea that in Jeremy Renner's other movies, he's really Clint undercover. 4,400 words, 6 chapters. Clint centric (duh) with Nat showing up in the last chapter.
You've got until I post the final chapter of Hugs to get your vote in. Which is the next chapter, actually. So you've got maybe three days. Right now the votes are pretty nearly even.
Thanks! Enjoy!
Chapter Seven
Prompt: Brother
Inadvertent art prompt: pinterest dot com /pin/519813981969936439/
Bucky woke to the sound of Steve vomiting.
He was clearly in no shape to be released from hospital. His medical team scurried to and fro, frowning and running tests and looking more harried as time wore on. Bucky stuck to his side like a limpet, distracting him as best he could with light banter, reading chapters of his book aloud, showing him videos of cats on the internet. Helen's ever-present smile started to fade by nightfall. Steve slept, and woke, and slept again. Bucky wiped the sweat away, watched Steve tossing and turning, and found himself genuinely praying for the first time since Zola's experiments after Azzano.
The next day, Steve could hardly sit up long enough to eat a few bites. His stare was glassy, eyes flitting around the room, never settling in one spot. "Hot," he mumbled when Bucky asked how he felt. "Too hot. Like I'm burning up." After a while he slipped into semi-consciousness, staring at nothing while the team bustled around them. Bucky damped the cloth again, wiped sweaty hair back from his forehead, and clamped down on futile tears.
Steve wouldn't die.
He couldn't.
By dinnertime on the second day, Helen's mouth formed a thin, straight line, and Bucky himself was snappish ball of nerves. Bruce brought food down for him; Bucky murmured an absent-minded thanks and set it aside. He'd eat later.
"I can take over," Bruce offered. "If you want to get some air… freshen up…. whatever."
Bucky shook his head.
"Do you, uh… want to talk about it?"
"No."
Bruce shifted his weight. "Bucky. You can't keep going like this. You'll wear yourself out."
"He needs me."
"He hardly knows you're here." The words were gentle.
Bucky hadn't known Steve was there, either, back when he was the Winter Soldier. But Steve had been there for him.
He wasn't going to let Steve down. Not again.
"He needs me," he repeated.
"An hour," Bruce said. "He can spare you that long. Have you even left this room since we were down here two nights ago?"
"No."
"So go on. Take a shower, take a nap, get some air. See some blue sky. The sun's shining. It's nice day outside."
"I don't — "
"How long has it been since you've slept?"
The answer sprang to his lips without conscious thought. The mind had more important things to think about. But the body knew. "Forty three hours."
"That's…" Bruce gaped. "That's insane. Bucky. You need to sleep, you're no use to — "
"I don't need sleep!" Bucky found himself on his feet, looming over Bruce. He glanced at Steve and moderated his tone. "I'm fine."
"No-one's fine on forty three hours without sleep. Who's going to look after Steve if you collapse and no-one's around, huh?"
"I said I'm fine."
"You can't — "
Bucky leant close and dropped his voice to a vicious whisper. "If I need to, I can go for fifty hours before I drop below peak condition. Ninety before I feel any serious impairment. One hundred and twenty before my system shuts down and initiates a complete reset. Hydra programmed me to run without sleep. Do you want me to tell you how they did that?"
Bruce's face was pale. He shook his head. "No."
"No. You don't." Breathing shallow, Bucky sat back down and reclaimed Steve's limp hand. "Thanks for the food."
It was eleven o'clock when Bucky noticed the dreaded spikes on the tox monitor starting to decrease. He stared, hardly daring to blink, and let it cycle for four minutes. No, his eyes hadn't lied to him. 4.47. 4.46. And again. 4.44 that time. Heart in his mouth, he hit the call button.
The first responder took sixteen seconds to arrive. She took one look at the tox screen and pulled out her phone. Despite the late hour, the full medical team converged on Steve within five minutes.
Twenty minutes after that, Helen Cho smiled again.
Steve had stabilised. The poison had been stopped. His system was in the process of breaking it down.
He was out of the woods.
Bucky stared blindly at the whirl of activity going on around the hospital bed as the realisation sank in. He would live. Steve would live. He — he would live.
His chin quivered treacherously.
He groped for his phone. The screen blurred into nothing. He blinked rapidly and tried again. Better. Fingers trembling, he typed a halting message and flicked a mass text off to the others.
Bucky: he's stabilised. tox dropping. visitors welcome a.m. two coffees please. and food.
And after a minute of more staring, he realised what he'd forgotten.
Bucky: Thank you.
Finally there was nothing more they could do for him. The running checks came through clean, showing exponential improvement. It was up to Steve now. Helen thanked Bucky profusely for waking them up and then chivvied her team out, telling him not to hesitate if he needed anything else.
The door closed on the last of them.
Bucky watched the rise and fall of Steve's chest for a long minute. Alive. Alive. Steve was — Steve would continue to be — alive.
He lowered his head to the bed and cried.
Steve had been awake for an hour by the time the others turned up at nine o'clock with pastries and coffee. They flooded inside, talking and laughing nineteen to the dozen. Bucky removed his arm from around Steve's shoulders and slipped off the bed.
"I need a shower," he said. "You'll be alright?"
Steve, pale but alert, rolled his eyes. "No, I'm going to have a heart attack as soon as you leave the room. I can't survive five minutes without you, I thought you knew that."
Bucky flipped him off. "You'd wonder, some days. Keep your phone on. Back soon." He slipped past the crowd at the door, met Bruce's knowing glance with a half-hearted glare, and vanished upstairs.
Courtesy of the supersoldier serum and better-than-cutting-edge medical care, Steve's recovery was phenomenal. By lunchtime he was alternately griping about the enforced bed rest and turning on the full Rogers charm for the med team. Helen remained unmoved — although she flushed a little when Thor popped in briefly — and Steve's release was set for seven o'clock that night, on the sole condition that his improvement remained steady.
When Natasha brought their afternoon coffees at four o'clock, she found them engaged in a one-armed pushup contest.
"Steve wouldn't settle," Bucky said, panting. Steve had made him use his human hand, claiming the metal arm gave him an unfair advantage. "Needed to work off some steam."
"So you decided on this?" She put the coffees down and perched on the arm of the visitor's chair. The phone made its compulsory appearance.
Steve poked his tongue out at her. "Peggy could do one hundred and seven. She licked the rest of the Howling Commandos hollow."
"Excuse — me," Bucky gasped. "I managed ninety eight, thank you."
Nat grinned. "Steve?"
"Camp Lehigh, I couldn't even do one. Austria, I stopped at one hundred and eight." He wiped away sweat. He was right-handed; Bucky had made him use his left arm for the contest. As if it would make any real difference. "She would've punched me if I'd lost on purpose. But I didn't want to win by too much."
The phone's blinking red light turned from Steve to Bucky. "And how many are you boys on now?"
Bucky blew out a breath and traded a glance with Steve. "Fifteen hundred?"
"Sixteen, I think."
They dipped and rose in unison, dipped and rose again. Bucky couldn't deny that their pace was slowing.
"Sixteen hundred, you might be right. I lost count somewhere around three hundred."
Natasha tapped at her phone. "If you're going for a world record, you're losing."
"How's that?"
"Guinness World Record for the most pushups in an hour is two thousand two hundred and twenty."
"We've been going eighteen minutes."
"The twenty-four hour record is… let's see… forty-six thousand. And one."
Bucky darted another glance at Steve, and was relieved to find his own feelings mirrored there. "Truce?"
"Truce." Steve collapsed to lie on the floor. "We'll try again when I'm feeling better. I've been sick."
"I've been running myself ragged looking after you."
"Excuses, excuses."
"Shut up, Rogers."
"Make me, Barnes."
The ensuing tickle fight only stopped when they rolled too close to the table and nearly knocked their rapidly cooling coffees off it.
"Oh," said Natasha in surprise. She sounded far too innocent.
Bucky grabbed his coffee, sat on the edge of the bed, and looked at her suspiciously. "What?"
"I got it wrong. Those records were for normal pushups, not one-armed."
Steve groaned and threw himself flat on the bed beside Bucky. "Now you tell us."
"Sorry."
"You are not."
"No, not really." She grinned. "Will you be upstairs for dinner?"
"Yes," said Steve before Bucky could answer. "Bucky's already posted bail for me. Helen's signing the release warrant at seven on the dot."
"Excellent. I'll see the two of you then."