Steve doesn't just gain muscles, but also better reflexes. He manages to shield her from the glass that rains down from the viewing platform, and she's left leaning down with Steve and Colonel Phillips shielding her back.
She's not even up before she hears one, two gunshots. With practiced ease from the equivalent of 1.7 times the academy training, she takes her gun from under her skirt and aims as she turns. She manages to hit the man running away on the shoulder, hopefully perforating his lung, and turns to look around to see if there is any more fighting, any more enemies infiltrated.
Then she notices Steve leaning over a man on the floor. It doesn't register who he is until she notices he's wearing a white coat.
No. No nonono.
"Abe!" she screams, running to their side. His index finger is placed right in the middle of Steve's chest, and she swallows her tears as she throws herself on the ground. She turns him around, but there is no exit wound, so her hands go to his chest to stop the blood flow. It's futile, and blood comes out anyway, red and warm against her pale hands.
She hasn't been affected by blood for years now. Changing bandages and cleanings pots for over six years will do that to you.
"Abe, c'mon, don't" she says when she notices the man close his eyes. He's still breathing, she can feel his chest moving under her hands, but probably not for long.
Lucy raises her eyes, and she knows there is hatred in them when she looks at Steve, and sees her feelings mirrored in his. It takes her maybe one second to make sure there is no red on his clothes, no wounds she has to worry about, before she speaks.
"Run" she says, and Steve understands, scrambling to get on his feet and out. If there is a time to break his limits, to test how fast, how long, how far, it was now.
She hears more gunshots as he gives pursuit, and she knows the men the SSR placed outside will be fighting, but she can't focus on that, she's there as a nurse, and even if she's not a doctor she has to try. Anything she does now, the rational part of her knows, would be useless if they don't stop the blood from coming out, and she'd need a doctor for that, and a real operating room, to see what vessel was damaged from the bullet–and the bullet itself doesn't matter, they could even leave it inside, she knows that more than one person goes around with bullets on them– but dammit, she has to try, she owes it to Abe to try anything she can.
"C'mon, Abe" she whispers, pressing even harder. The blood is stopping now, but not because he's getting better "C'mon" she says, using one of her hands to slap his face softly "Don't do this, Abe, c'mon"
"Agent Rogers" she hears someone behind her.
"I have to put pressure on the wound. Has someone arranged a car? We need to get him into a hospital now!" there is no movement under her hands, but she has stopped thinking clearly the moment she realized it was Abe on the ground. They have to take them to the hospital, any would do, Brooklyn, El-Beth, Jewish, which was closer? It had to be-
"Agent Rogers–Lucia. C'mon" hands place themselves on her upper arms, sliding down to grab her bloody wrists to pry her away from the doctor "C'mon, girl" the man–Colonel Phillips, she notices– guides her away towards the bathrooms. He places her in front of the sink, helping her hands under the water like her mother used to do when she was too small to see where it was falling. The water comes away red, staining the porcelain a bloody crimson. His thumbs are gentle when they rub away the red.
"He's dead, isn't he?" she says, eyes trained on her hands but not really seeing "By a fucking spy-How did that man get in here?! Either he was really good at being someone else, or we have a-"
"Senator Brandt gave him a ride. We'll get to the bottom of this, Rogers" Phillips was unusually gentle as he used the tips of his fingers to rub away the blood from her nails.
"Son of a bitch. How can a man be so fucking useless" she uses her shoulder to try and wipe away the angry tears that leak from her eyes. A good man was dead because that fucker was an idiot and Abe was dead.
Abe was dead.
The water suddenly seems alien to her. She sees it fall into her fingers, but she can't really feel it. And were those really her fingers? They didn't seem all that familiar. There are no rings, no bracelets, and her nails are short and without polish–nurses hands, they can't have anything that could catch dirt or blood or something of the like, and it would make sense that those are her hands, but she can't feel them, can't sense them attached to her arms and to her body.
She thinks someone is talking, but it doesn't really register. The water is cut off, but she can't bring herself to look away. Someone pulls her to her feet, and she thinks her hands drip water into the floor as she's led back. They don't make her go to the room with the chamber, instead leading her outside, past the antique store. There is a pool of blood in the carpet, but no bodies. A warmer arm passes around her, replacing the other man, and she buries herself more into it. Even if it's barely registered in her mind, something inside her tells her it's familiar and safe. She's in a car before she realizes she should care who's beside her.
When she looks, it takes her a few good seconds to know who it is.
"Hello, Steve" she says. Steve is bigger than usual. Or had he always been like that? No, she was sure Steve was smaller than even her, skinny, not the muscled man sitting beside her. But those are Steve's eyes, of that she is certain, and that is his voice that had been trying to get her to react, almost unusually deep for someone his former size.
"Lucy. Are you okay?" his arm is still around her, heavier and warmer than ever, but somehow still so familiar it feels like he has always been that way.
"Of course" she says, blinking. "Why?"
"Lucy…there was a shooting" Steve is gentle with his words, taking her hands into hers, and even if he feels different, she's sure it's him.
"Are you okay? Was someone we know injured?" she looks outside the car, seeing they have reached their apartment complex. The driver is looking ahead, hands gripping the steering away a tad too strongly. She uses the mirror to look behind the car, and sees another car parked a few meters away from them, two men she thinks she has seen before looking around the place. Were they following or protecting? She thinks maybe they are from the SSR, but she can't be sure. She was never all too good with faces she couldn't put a name to. She's debating whether to voice her concerns to Steve when he speaks.
"Luce….Dr. Erskine is dead" and that makes her look at him, her eyes searching for anything in his that can tell her it's a lie. She's usually very good at knowing when Steve is lying, but right then there is nothing on his face to give him away.
"No that can't be true. I just saw him" she shakes her head, a smile on her lips. When she looks down, there is blood on her white uniform. She feels her hands start to tremble until all of her is shaking "That can't be true. Not him. It's not real"
Somehow, Steve takes her to their bed and lays her down. She's not sure how, but she knows she's somewhere safe when her face hits something soft.
She's not sure when she falls asleep, either, but she wakes up when it's still dark outside. She blink a few times before the familiar view of her bedroom is clear to her.
And then it hits her like a ton of bricks, all at once, and her sobs are desperate as she suffocates under their weight.
Steve has known Lucy since he was thirteen. He knows she's not a loud crier, that she stifles her sobs and would never wail. That she pulls her grieving deep inside when around other people, her face the perfect mask of composure. It's not mad to think that the loss of her third parent figure would be what broke the camel's back.
He breaks out of a daze just nearing midnight, when he hears the way her breath quickens. It's odd to hear so well when his whole life he had been hard of hearing in one of his sides.
He recognizes the way her breathing gives way to sobbing, and doesn't hesitate to get up and go to her. He knows this will be hard for her, and the fact that they have only a few hours before having to show themselves in uniform for tests and orders makes it all harder.
"Lucy" he calls and she lifts her head from her hands, hair already sticking to her face with the sweat from her sleeping.
"I…I want to think that it's not me, but-Steve, I-"
"It's not. Lucy, it's not" he places himself at her side, letting her wet his shirt with her tears. It's the same one from before, with the hole from the graze of the bullet just above the tender skin that is already scarring over, because it's the only thing that actually fits, not taking into account the new uniform, pressed and not touched, that lays on the table back in the kitchen.
Lucy feels tiny in his arms, now. She had always been taller than him, just a tad wider because he was so thin. When he starts to pet her hair in hopes of soothing her, he realizes even that feels wrong–or maybe not wrong, but odd. Like the time Bucky had shifted all the furniture in his parent's apartment just an inch to the side and Annie kept bumping into things without realizing it.
"It doesn't hurt as much as my mom, or yours" she murmurs some minutes after, when her sobbing has turned into the occasional hiccup and deep breath, the kind where you couldn't stop breathing even if you tried and it came in in shorts bursts "It's more like it reminded me of them, and how they left me too, so it kind of snowballed and left me feeling like…"
"Like it's your fault, because you got too close" he whispers against her hair. Steve can feel her hands tugging at a loose thread from the nightgown he changed her into.
"Yeah" she sighs, her arms tightening around him.
"You know that's not true" he pulls away and makes her look at him in the eyes.
"But it still feels like that" Lucy shrugs, looking away.
And he knows. He knows because he knows Lucy, and he knows the slope of her shoulders and the way it dips when they go to the cemetery, when they take the long way to her mother's grave on November 1st after vising his folks and her father, and the way her eyes glisten with something even deeper than grieving.
"Let's get you washed up, alright?" he nudges her, knowing there is more than the day's grime on her that she need to wash away.
And afterwards, she's desperate and hungry when she presses herself against him, in the need for something to ground her, to tell her that some things would never change despite everything else that did, and the whispered reassurance, the loving touches and devoted kissing feels the same as always, even if everything else doesn't.
