The room is silent and cool, a dimly lit cocoon that encases just the two of them. Always – it seems – it comes down to just the two of them.

Stark is out making the rounds, rubbing elbows with every powerful head of state, business owner, or professional investor he thinks might be able to shed some light on Ross' dealings… or anything else they so desperately need answers about. Steve and Natasha are preparing – probably packing at this very moment – to go meet with Ross in DC, now that they finally managed to get in through his guard dog of a secretary. Bruce is with Mattingly and the rest of the prescribed med team… getting ready. And the others? Well, all the others have gone back to their day-to-day drills – training in the gym, perusing decades-old files in the store room, or simply passing time idly in an attempt to not think about what's happening up in medical today.

Bucky glances furtively down at his watch and notes the time – almost four o'clock. They'll be coming to take her away soon. An always composed and professional Dr. Mattingly. A still-reticent, but unwilling to not be there Dr. Banner. And a small, specially selected-by-Dr. Barnes-herself medical crew. They'll all be here shortly, invading their peaceful – albeit frighteningly sterile – little cocoon. And they'll take her away.

Tessa gazes up at her husband from her cozy spot, deeply nestled in the hospital bed, as she absently burrows further into the fluffy pillows surrounding her. She watches as his tired eyes veer off to stare at nothing, his pale, drawn face swallowed up by a painfully distracted expression. And she leans over a bit to give his a knee a sharp nudge with her elbow. "Whatcha thinking about?" she asks lightly as his icy blue eyes shift over to meet hers.

He smiles at her – a mere empty quirk of his lips – and he replies, "Thinking 'bout what to have for dinner."

She barks out a laugh, jokes – even halfhearted ones like this – have been so rarely proffered these past few days. Her body slips further down the bed, tired muscles struggling to hold her upright, and she runs her hand slowly down the length of his thigh. "You know what I was thinking?" she asks coyly, a cunningly playful grin on her face.

He glances down at his leg perched along the edge of the bed, her fingers trailing delicately over to his knee before tapping a playful rhythm out on his patella. He swallows thickly. "What's that?"

She looks up at him and bites at the corner of her lip before muttering, almost dreamily, "I finally get to know what it's like to have Steve inside of me."

A quick snort of laughter tumbles out involuntary, reverberating up though his chest, and his eyes pull back into a dramatic eyeroll. He shakes his head vaguely, though the rest of his body barely shifts, remaining staunch and frozen in his sentinel-like pose by her side. His hip is warm and firm next to hers, his body naturally dipping closer as the thin hospital bed mattress flounders with his weight.

She too lets out a short chuckle and gazes up at him with her bright green eyes full of a sort of enthusiasm that he just cannot comprehend right now. Peppered also with a decent amount of trepidation, which he knows she's trying desperately to hide from him. "Should I rephrase that?" she asks with a short wiggle of her brows.

He smirks despite himself, the pull of his lips feeling foreign and unwarranted. He's far too worried, too terrified of what's about to happen to smile and play along. But he does it anyway. How could he not, when she's looking at him like that? He shakes his head fondly and replies, "I wish you would."

Another giggle – small but true – and she clears her throat. "After this procedure," she intones, straightening her shoulders and putting on a mock-stern face, "Steve will officially be inside my head."

He leans back a bit and blows out an incredulous breath. "Good luck then. I feel like he's been in my head all my life. Mostly judging and lecturing."

Another light, airy laugh spills out of her, and he feels that same tug and pull in his chest that's been plaguing him for days. Ever since they said the enhanced hypothalamic cells were ready. Ever since she told him that she'd be okay – I promise – and in the same breath stated that she loved him more than anything, the sweet and sincere utterance sounding a bit too much like those goodbyes that they never say.

Tessa wiggles a bit at his side, curling around him and snuggling back into the pillows behind her. "If I come out of this saying things like, I just want to do what's right and stand up for the little guy, I guess we'll know it worked… Captain America's cells have taken root."

This time, the grin that pulls at his lips is wholly honest – soft and amused and utterly genuine. "You already say shit like that," he teases with a tiny poke in her ribs.

She lets out a small eep in protest before rolling further onto her side. "I have never once said that I want to help out the little guy. I'm not that noble."

"Sure," he says with a roll of his eyes. "And all of this is just for you and not to help all the other mutants we find who might have a fucked-up hypothalamus."

She shrugs blithely. "Maybe a little. I mean, if it were just about me, well…" she glances up at him from beneath long, dark lashes, batting provocatively around exhausted eyes. "I'd much rather have you inside of me."

He breathes out a terse chuckle, ducking his head to hide the small, surprised blush blooming on his cheeks. A little voice inside of him dreamily inquires, How can she still do this to me? "Well it sounds like you still have my plasma on a shelf somewhere," he mutters with a soft lilt. "In case you want to use it later."

Not quite, she thinks, blinking her gaze guiltily away.

As it turned out, they couldn't actually use the cells gathered from Bucky at all, the rather arduous procedures they were put through causing them to degrade beyond repair. But Tessa hadn't told him that… no, of course not. She knew her husband well enough to know that hearing that would only make him feel like he had somehow let her down. Without a doubt, he would be heartbroken, feeling – once again – like there was nothing he could do to help her.

Luckily, the stem cells from Steve proved to be strong enough to make it through the isolation of his healing factor. And that made sense… after all, he had been through a much more thorough procedure with the super soldier serum – the Vitarays undoubtably causing it to adhere and replicate exponentially – than Bucky ever experienced with the prolonged trials done by Hydra. Bucky's serum-laced cells may have been amazing, but Steve's were absolutely phenomenal… unlike anything anyone in the lab had ever seen before (save Tessa, who is the only person he ever willingly gave his blood to for a looksee-loo).

The first several hours in the lab had been more fawning than anything, Tessa having to put on her stern boss face and shout at everyone to get their shit together and their asses to work when she finally made it down – after the hell of an hour-long hot flash – to check in on their progress. But the techs Tony had moved over from Stark Industries were among the best they had, most of them having been part of her team for years. And once they got over their initial excitement at being able to play with Captain America's cells, they quickly got to work.

It took a bit of time, sure. They all knew it would. But not even twelve hours after Tessa had spilled to Tony that she was scared about time, her team presented her with what appeared to be fully functioning – serum-enhanced – hypothalamic cells. Just a day later, they were deemed ready for implantation. Of course, as far as everyone who was working in the lab on this top-secret project knew, this was just the very beginning of trials. They most assuredly were not going to involve human subjects so early… no, that was entirely out of the question. They all assumed the trial implantations would be done in rats, perhaps even monkeys. But Tessa knew that they didn't have that kind of time.

And besides, Tony was afraid that if they brought monkeys in, Wanda and Natasha would adopt them as pets and let them run free throughout the compound. He probably wasn't wrong.

Make no mistake, it's is a dangerous thing to do. A stupid, ridiculous, reckless plan that'll probably get you killed, according to Bruce. A complicated, high-risk procedure, according to Dr. Mattingly. The only possible option, according to Tessa. Dangerous, yes. Reckless? Perhaps. But absolutely, unarguably, irrefutably necessary.

"Walk me through it again," Bucky says, his low, soothing voice easily pulling Tessa from her thoughts. He gives her hand a small squeeze and waits for her oddly distant gaze to return to his.

She shows him a small smile. "They'll put me under," she begins, twisting her hand in his grip and twining her fingers with his. "Then Mattingly will go in transorbitally – "

"Like they did when they… extracted," he interrupts, jaw ticking to the side as he mutters the words.

She nods – "It's less invasive. And I won't feel a thing." – and gently strokes the back of his hand with her thumb. She lets out a small huff and says, "Then she'll shoot my hypothalamus full of super cells and… voila! I'll be cured!"

He gives her a skeptical look, single brow raised high. "Just like that, huh? Just that easy?"

"Just that easy," she says, an air of surety to her voice as she awkwardly hauls herself upright and leans in to do her best to kiss away all of his worry and doubt.

000

The procedure itself is rather easy. Once Dr. Mattingly has everything positioned just right to inject the cells without affecting the rest of Tessa's brain, anyway. The whole thing only takes about an hour – from wheeling her in to wheeling her out. But she's unconscious for what seems like an eternity after.

"The implantation might've been relatively simple," Dr. Mattingly tells Bucky with a bit of a smug smirk, "but it's still going to be a shock to her system. Not to mention, to prepare for the implantation, we've been working to kill off her immune system for days – weeks really, considering the fact that she's been on steroids since the adrenal crisis first began." Her expression softens, small, mollifying smile blooming as she reaches out and gives his bicep a sharp squeeze. "She just needs a little bit of time."

They check her hormone levels every three hours, eager to see if there's any change in the functioning of her thyroid, pituitary, adrenal glands. Ten hours in and all they can say is that she's holding steady. "It's good," Bruce says, shaking his head slightly. "I still don't trust it. And I still think this whole damn thing is risky as hell. But… so far, so good."

Bucky leans in once the doctor leaves the room and whispers tenderly into his wife's ear, "I hope you heard that. That might be the closest thing to a good job he'll ever give you on this."

Fourteen hours in… still no change. Levels holding steady, which everyone still claims is good. But she's also still unconscious, which – no matter how many times he's told is fine and nothing to be worried about – strikes Bucky as being simply, purely bad.

People come and go – Bruce and Mattingly check in on her, Sam and Wanda check in on him. But Bucky never leaves her side, not for a moment. He barely leaves her bed, only rising every so often to crack his back and pace a bit to get his blood flowing. And even then, even as he strides idly back and forth in the dimly lit hospital room – the dull beep of the heart monitor sounding in the background, her soft, shallow breaths echoing in his hypersensitive ears – even then, his eyes remain wholly fixed on his wife.

She'd probably think him silly if she saw him right now, watching her so agonizingly closely from across the room, intent gaze trained on her chest, lest the steady rise and fall should change. Static stare focused on her face in case a pained grimace forms. Utterly rapt attention on her eyes, waiting, should they pop open and scan the room, desperate for some familiar sight. She would laugh and grin crookedly at him – he's sure – mocking his anxieties with a flippant, You worry too much.

But how can he not worry? After all that they've been through, after all that the past two years had brought?

When he first watched her die – that awful day by the river – there'd been a part of him that was too much in shock to even process what had happened, let alone be worried in the moment. When she began to fall apart after – her mind splitting at the seams, memories and nightmares pouring out into the pitch black nights – through it all, there'd been a voice in his head reminding him that he'd been through something similar… and he'd managed to find his way out. When she was taken away from him – held in a frozen hell where her cries were unable to reach his waiting ears – he'd honestly been too intent, too determined to let the agonizing fear he felt get in the way of simply bringing her home.

But now – silently pacing the floorboards at the foot of her bed – now there's nothing to keep the worry at bay. There's no shock to override his fear. No soothing realization that this is just like other trials they've seen – and overcome – in the past. No unbridled resolve pumping through his veins to find her, save her, fix her. Because she's right here with him. And he knows there's nothing he can do to save her from this, no way – even with his super-human abilities – that he can fix anything happening inside of her right now.

And the truth is – maybe he's just been beaten down by all the shit they've encountered recently – but right now, he can't help but think that he might just be on the verge of losing her completely. That if he turns away for even a moment – just blinks at the wrong time – then she might finally disappear altogether. And really, is that so crazy?

Tess would say it is, he thinks to himself with a annoyed scoff as he returns to her side and drops heavily into the chair by her bed.

But it isn't really. Because it's happened once already. He let her go, for just a moment, it seemed. And then she was gone. Gone for so damn long. And he honestly doesn't think that he'll ever recover from those months without her… not ever.

But the last few months have been a shitshow too, he thinks haughtily.

Sure, having her back in his arms, back in his bed, just back, that's been the most incredible feeling in the world. Especially after so long without her, after so much… emptiness. But even the good days had been filled with a constant sort of trepidation, a never-ending fear that someone might come back and steal her away again. Or that her powers – obviously having grown so much greater, so much deeper while she was away – might somehow engulf her and become too much to bear. Killing her like the Phoenix did to Jean Grey. Consuming her like it did to Anna. Or – and wasn't this the thing on everyone's mind of late? – she might just lose her battle with this mysterious sickness and fade away, even while resting in his arms.

Fade away, he thinks as his dull gray eyes roam over her slight, still body. She's so small, she looks like she might just fade away.

And what a surprising and awful thing to think about this woman before him… this fierce and fearless, brilliant and beautiful, utterly amazing … force. She had never been small before. Never been quiet nor subdued nor weak. Never been in danger of wilting and languishing and fading away.

He reaches out and pulls her thin, frail hand into his, tracing lightly over the tendons protruding beneath her pale flesh. So small, he thinks again, blinking his eyes tightly shut as he folds her long, cold fingers into his palm.

He had never thought of her as small before, never even considered her to be a particularly petite woman. She's taller than Natasha, bit shorter than Wanda – I'm average height for a woman, he remembers her arguing with great offense when he once implied that she couldn't reach the highest cabinets. A thing that is true, incidentally, otherwise she wouldn't always rely on him to put away certain dishes. But while she's obviously much shorter than him, and she's certainly always been a bit on the thin side – Because you never eat enough, he silently chides with a shake of his head – she's never been small.

He had never thought of her as frail or weak or slight. Not even when she almost drowned – died – and then began to come apart. Not even after the motorcycle accident, when she truly was broken and anemic and seemed – to him in particular – to be so very… fragile. Not even when she fell into a deep depression, darkness washing her features and fraying her nerves and leaving her breathless. Even then, he never thought of her as weak or small. Because he knew it was all just temporary. Because he saw – though it took time and a hell of a lot of patience – improvement. Recovery. Growth.

But how many weeks – months – has it been now? How many times has he reached across the bed in the middle of the night and gently wrapped his entire hand around her forearm, a test to see how much – if any – of her existed that wasn't just skin-covered bone? How many times has he held her close and felt her ribs jut into his chest, stabbing through to his heart? How many times has he looked at her face and – for just the briefest of moments – not recognized the pale, skeletal countenance looking back at him?

How long has it been since he's held Tessa close without a dizzying fear ripping through his core?

Too long, he thinks, blowing a low, frustrated breath out of heavily flared nostrils. It's been too damn long.

He wants his wife back. Actually, no… he had never even really had the chance to have his wife at all, she was taken from him so swiftly after they returned from their tropical wedding.

No, he wants his girl back.

The girl he warmed up to faster than anyone else on the team because of her fearless demeanor and her sly sense of humor. And her seeming need to help him rebuild and reclaim himself… no matter how hard he pushed back on her advances.

The girl he silently, moodily pined after for months, not even realizing until so much later just how much time he'd spent following her shadow, lurking behind in a room she'd just left so he could freely inhale her scent after she was gone.

The girl who had made him smile and laugh, even when he was convinced his body – and soul – no longer knew how.

The girl who gave Steve hell and encouraged him to do the same, eagerly working to reconstruct a brotherly bond begun long before she was ever even born.

The girl who talked a big game about being able to work better and longer and more efficiently than anyone else – trying to justify her ridiculous hours at any number of labs – but would pass out at her own desk or fall face first into his lap with a snore in the blink of an eye.

The girl who held him in the dark of night and told him that she could keep him safe, could keep the nightmares away.

The girl who kissed him once and stole his heart, only to lend it back in silly squeaks and sultry moans and tender touches each and every time they made love.

He's tired – so damn tired – of seeing that girl only in fleeting glimpses, feeling her presence merely in passing caresses.

He's tired – so unbelievably tired – of waiting for her to return to him… full and complete and larger than life.

He's tired – so unbearably tired – of Lobe and his plans. Of the anti-mutant sentiment that spurns him on and causes Tessa to shrink away. Of the X-Men and their… interference… their reclaimed position in his girl's life, even when they aren't around at all. Of post-traumatic stress and nightmares. Of self-doubt and the agonizing byproducts of vying for self-preservation. Of hormones and sickness and wasting away. Of Bruce saying this plan won't work. Of Mattingly – and everyone else – telling him blankly that it's all going to be okay, that she'll be okay, as though he's blind to the blatant fear bubbling in their eyes.

Damnit, he's tired of Tessa not being okay. And of him not being okay either.

He's so fucking tired.

He shuts his eyes again, this time letting the lids linger closed as he leans forward and rests his temple on the sacred knot of their tangled hands. And he lets his thoughts spin away in a bitter and angry shuffle – I'm so tired. So fucking tired. Of… everything. Of all of this. So tired.

He doesn't even realize that he's fallen asleep, that this dark refrain has somehow seduced his exhausted body to slumber. Not until he feels her long, lithe fingers gently carding through his hair, slowly, softly scratching at his scalp as they go. He shifts a bit, pulling his cheek through a small line of drool and grimacing as he does so.

"I thought you'd never wake up," she mutters, smile in her voice, as he slowly raises his head.

He swipes at his face to rid it of any slobber and rub out the wrinkles left behind by the sheets that bunched beneath his cheek. "You're one to talk," he breathes out amid a yawn.

She's blurry at first, sitting upright before him, reclining just a bit into the pillows stacked up behind her. So he blinks… once, twice… until she comes into focus. And that's when he sees, when he just somehow knows – despite the still-angular jut to her chin and cheeks, despite the too-damn-thin arm hanging in his periphery as her hand tangles in his hair, despite her pale skin and the deep bruises still blemishing beneath her eyes – it's his girl staring back at him.