"For once I'm not happy Peter has this super healing factor."

Steve laughs as Tony jerks awake from a doze, the culprit being Bruce's mutter. His feet fall off the empty chair, the one Bucky had vacated hours earlier.

"Hmm?" Tony rubs his face. "Whatsat? Are they finished?"

Steve takes pity on him. It is, after all, three in the morning. He presses the intercom button between the medical theater and their viewing window. "Why is that, Bruce?"

Bruce, though he's taken a back seat for this surgery, refuses to leave the room while Peter is sedated. The boy has been laid out on his stomach and two incisions made in his back, one near the base of his neck and one to reopen the tailbone wound.

The blood on Cho's gloves turns Steve's stomach.

It had Bucky's too, even though he lasted a full three hours. He'd stolen one too many nervous glances at all the medical tools and Steve suggested he take a walk.

Clint and Natasha didn't physically join them for this, but Steve has a feeling they've hacked a camera and are watching from somewhere they can freak out privately.

Bruce shakes his head. "His body has been trying to reintegrate that bone shard, closing around it."

Steve must visibly hesitate because Bruce makes a circular shape with his hands. "Think of a burdock stuck inside a ball of soft yarn, the yarn being Peter's nerves. It's shredding them. No wonder he was in pain."

Ah. That explains the convulsing.

Cho holds up a pair of tiny forceps. Her clavicle is slick with sweat. "Got it!"

And there, on display for them, is a bloody yet surprisingly thick cap of bone. She drops it in a Petri dish. A few of the nurses pat her on the shoulder and chatter in Korean. Bruce shakes her hand in exhausted gratitude.

The bullet chiseled it off, so small we didn't notice. Steve is winded and he's done nothing but sit here for five hours. One bullet might have paralyzed him for life.

Tony nudges Steve out of the way to press the button. "What about his cranial nerves? Especially III through IV? Your report wasn't fun, Bruce."

"We used small laser solders to reattach them as best we can. That will hopefully boost brain function and responses."

"Now?" Steve asks.

Bruce removes his mask. "Now…we wait."

So they do, for another three hours while the anesthetic wears off.

Tony and Steve sleep in shifts, wanting someone to be by Peter's side at all times. Bruce nods off standing up at one point so Steve shoves him into the chair by Bucky's bed, who's already dead to the world.

Steve doesn't realize he's fallen asleep right there in the recovery bay until hushed voices pick up in volume.

"Good news—his parasympathetic systems are back online. He's breathing for himself and his feet twitched when I poked them with a cold rod. He can feel them again."

Tony's seething, even at a whisper. "Don't hedge it, Bruce. No patronizing bull crap with me."

"He…his EEG wasn't great, Tony. Peter's brain waves are still…flat."

"Flat? Meaning?"

"He's not responding."

"Well, not to be callous here but he wasn't before either. He wouldn't respond to our questions."

"No, Tony, I mean he's not responding to anything."

A beat. Steve wrestles his eyes open to the alarming sight of Bruce finally in tears. It's a relief and a hail Mary all in one.

"Before," Bruce explains, "Peter at least looked at stimulus he heard or reacted to touch."

"And now?"

"Tony—he won't even wake up. I'm not sure he ever will."


Coffee mugs are left on floors, stairs. Wherever is most convenient when someone stops caring.

Food spoils in the fridge. Tea grinds mold. Lights are left off, even when it rains, a small mercy in that the weather reflects their last hope and how it didn't work.

"Pathetic fallacy," Bucky says when the downpour spatters against the windows.

Steve remembers the term from his English class days but can't remember what it means.

Pathetic, though. That fits.

We were foolish to think this surgery would be a magic solution.

Nobody pretends anymore. No one comforts each other with optimistic speeches about how things will get better or Peter will wake up or they only need some time.

Time is all they have left anyway.

The reality of this wasteland that has become their lives does not fully sink in for Steve until the night he goes down to the gym. He boxes, his go-to.

He hits and punches and slams that bag until he wants it to break. It does, of course, and sand spills at his feet.

Only when it tears apart does Steve sense another presence in the room. He turns, and there is Natasha, sitting on the mat. Her eyes rest somewhere near Steve but too distant to be on anything.

She's got one knee tucked underneath her and the other propped up, where she rests her crossed arms.

Natasha, out of everyone on the team, possesses the best ability to be still. To make her body fully marble and unmoving. It's a coup of human agility, something so otherworldly in her proficiency of it that the others have gotten used to seeing her sit somewhere for hours at a time without moving.

So the sight itself shouldn't be unnatural.

But here in this moment where Steve wonders if being alive is worth it right now, it's wrong.

There's something very wrong about how still she is.

Steve almost calls her name and then thinks better of it. He realizes what feels weird—they're in the gym. This is where she moves the most.

By the white of her bare feet and pale lips, she's been sitting here for a long time. Maybe even longer than he has, which isn't surprising considering how in his head he's been.

Steve doesn't say anything, just walks silently over and sits in front of her, his own legs pretzel folded.

Natasha's eyes shift when Steve sighs.

"Do you ever wish you could die?" asks Natasha in that aching tone she, for some unfathomable reason, only lets Steve hear.

She sounds years younger, like Steve is getting a glimpse of what Natasha would have been like as a normal woman and not one who'd been trained to dismember people. It's almost too intimate. Steve has the bizarre urge to avert his eyes.

He doesn't, fixing them on Nat.

Steve's voice is rough and broken. "All the time, before I met you guys."

"And now?"

Steve doesn't move.

Lines in Natasha's forehead squeeze together and her nostrils flare. "This is the first time I've wanted to die for someone else. And this is the first time I can't fight the problem."

"It's not fair," says Steve, and understands all at once that this is the litany his head has been chanting for days. The same rhythm as his punches.

Tony was right. Loving someone is dangerous.

"Clint told me something once, and I didn't believe him." Natasha's fingers twitch and Steve finally sees they're holding a tiny knife. A butterfly knife. "Didn't know enough to get what he was saying."

Steve goes still too. His eyes remain on the knife. "What's that?"

"That in love you always give more than you get. It's always somewhat of a one way street. He said it was still worth it. Every time." Nat too looks down at the blade. "I'm not so sure, though."

The keen edge of the knife has been at a very specific angle the whole time. Perfectly positioned.

At last, an automaton released, Steve rocks forward and gradually pulls the blade out of Natasha's unflinching grip.

Away from her throat.

Nat is glazed enough that she just watches when Steve throws the knife far away from where they sit. It skids away, echoing off the floor.

"I don't see another way out, Steve." Her tone is pitched slightly higher, like she might cry, but she doesn't.

"Me neither."

At last, Nat meets his eyes full on.

Steve stands, dusting off his pants. "But we'll find one together, even if it's just putting one foot in front of the other for the rest of our lives."

Natasha doesn't take Steve's offered hand. She sits there and stares up at him with a burning gaze. "Has loving Peter made me weak?"

"Are you thinking about killing yourself again?"

Nat's brow smooths as she really considers about this. Her head cants and then she decides, "No."

"Then no. It's only made you stronger."

"Are you thinking about it?"

Steve almost says, of course not, then pauses. He knows he'd never do it deliberately, not with Bucky around now, but some of his patterns of behaviour are self destructive.

"If I do," says Steve, "I'll come straight to you. We'll figure it out, accountable to each other. Deal?"

Natasha rides Steve's pull to her feet. "Best offer I've had all night."


Bucky still refuses to give up his bed in the infirmary. He's shoved it closer to Peter's, just to watch him sleep.

He knows it's not exactly sleep, but it's easier to call it that.

Peter is indeed breathing on his own and that's about as far as the good news goes. Sometimes, when everyone else finally goes away, Bucky climbs up next to Peter and breathes into his hair.

He doesn't say anything on these occasions. Doesn't need to. Peter is good without words and so is Bucky.

He and Stark make quite the pair, one chattering non-stop when he visits Peter, one completely silent. Bucky lays there after Steve goes down to the gym, eyes closed as he holds the boy close.

Bucky's never noticed the pattern of faint freckles across Peter's nose until tonight. They spatter across the milky skin like stars and glow with Peter's skin so wan.

I'm sorry. I know it's only a matter of time before someone takes me out for this. The one problem they can't fix is the one I caused.

Bucky smooths a hand through Peter's curls and listens to Peter's slow, mechanical heartbeat for the rest of the night.