Eyes track him as he opens the door, following him all the way to the chair beside the bed where he will sit. This has become their ritual each day for the past several weeks.
Steve will sit and talk about everything and nothing. Bucky will lie still in silence, sometimes listening, sometimes not.
Today, he changes the dance.
"You died." Bucky rasps in uncertain English. He stumbles a bit over the words, seems confused by the sound of them. He sounds parched.
"So did you." Steve says gently, filling a soft plastic cup with water and offering it. The last time Bucky was given a glass, he shattered it and tried to use the shards on the restraints. … The guy always had been resourceful.
Bucky makes no move to accept the water.
"I am not dead." The Soldier murmurs thoughtfully, turning his eyes away to the monitors that are a constant reminder of his vital signs.
It's the one thing he's sure about, even if everything else is vague.
Death should not hurt. It should not burn, and ache, and freeze.
"No. You're not." Steve agrees. "And neither am I."
"I should be."
"No way. You're too tough to die, apparently. Me, I'm just too dumb."
"How...?" Bucky can't seem to find the words, so Steve takes his best guess at what he wants.
"Honestly, I don't know. I figured we'd both die young, as stupid as we were. But here we are, 95 and 96 year old geezers: still kicking."
Bucky looks blankly back at him.
"I saw you die. You attacked me. How did you survive?"
"What, when I fell? You dragged me out." Steve is working to keep his voice level and his answers calm and easy. Inside he's bursting. Bucky is finally talking. To him. And it's not threats or fluent Russian swearing.
They're really talking.
"Not that... You... attacked me. I defended myself and- …" A troubled shadow falls over Bucky's eyes. He trails off, frowning.
" You died. ...And ...dissolved."
"... I dissolved?"
"You were smaller." He says, apparently expecting this to clarify.
Steve blinks, trying to keep the hope out of his voice.
"You remembered the old me?"
"You tried to kill me… the small you. But then you died. ...And dissolved." He repeats, confused by his own retelling. He lapses into a helpless silence. There's a beaten look on his face, like he expects to be punished for this inadequacy.
Steve tries not to see it.
He frowns, unsure how to take this revelation. He's sure Bucky was hallucinating before they reached him, so this is probably just a fever-dream that he's talking about, but… he remembers something. Something HYDRA didn't teach him. That counts as progress, right?
Abruptly, he thinks of the photo they recovered from the house, disregarded in the chaos of Bucky's reappearance. It may be the thing that jogged his memory before. Maybe it can do it again.
He thinks it probably belonged to Peggy, like the computer, but he's been so consumed with Bucky's care that he hasn't had a chance to return it to her yet. He wants to do so in person.
He stands and goes to the drawer where it's being kept, and offers it to Bucky.
"Did I look like this?"
Bucky hisses out a sharp breath of distress and tries to jerk away. The restraints won't let him.
"What? What's wrong?"
"Dead." Bucky hisses. "Dead. Dead. Dead." He repeats this over and over, flinching away when Steve tries to touch his shoulder. He huddles there, chanting it, until Steve finally leaves the room, disheartened.
