Just a warning that things get pretty heavy in this chapter. It contains a discussion of end-of-life care and similar subjects.

Steve X: Two Years

Steve filmed those videos for future generations of Gravesen patients just in time. The instant he sat down in the office with Dr. Erskine at his next clinic visit, he could see on his face that this "Chat" would contain momentous news, and he wasn't disappointed. Because his lung function had remained so low for so long without any signs of recovery, it was time to list him for transplant. Steve expected that news. He'd been awaiting it for months now. But he was taken aback by the estimate that accompanied it.

"At this rate, without a transplant, we're looking at roughly two years."

Two years.

Bucky had just gotten another round of scans back, and they showed he was two years cancer free. The end of his treatment didn't feel all that long ago. But it was two years ago. And two years from now, Steve might very well be dead. Bucky would only be four years cancer free by then, meaning Steve wouldn't even get to celebrate the "cured" benchmark of five years NED with him. He wouldn't even reach twenty one. Steve didn't particularly care about drinking alcohol legally, especially given it was strongly discouraged for someone with his condition, but it was the principle of the thing. He might not even get to exercise the right to vote that he'd just aged into mere weeks ago, not for a president anyways. He probably wouldn't even complete the transition from pediatric to adult CF care.

Two years didn't sound like much when most people his age looked forward to decades.

After hearing that number, Steve could barely focus on the extensive discussion of transplant that followed. Erskine sent him and Dad home with thick stacks of paperwork, but Steve didn't even bother to look through it all. The first few minutes of the ride home passed in near silence, but ultimately Dad couldn't resist talking over everything that had just been piled on top of them.

He began with a simple, "What are you thinking about?"

Steve sighed. There was so much he should be thinking about in the wake of everything he'd just learned, but in his mind he saw nothing but calendars—two calendars to be exact. That's it. A coughing fit interrupted him before he could answer the question. "Two years," he muttered.

Dad briefly took his eyes off the road to glance at Steve. "Yeah, that's…a lot to take in."

"No, it's not a lot," Steve corrected. "It's only two years."

Dad's grip on the wheel noticeably tightened. Not another word was spoken the entire rest of the way home. Steve dumped the stack of papers on the kitchen table and retreated to his room. He dug out All Quiet on the Western Front and started reading in the hopes it would distract him, but the words floated off the page and disappeared into nothingness. Just like he might in two years' time. Steve knew the odds, knew how many people sat on the list ahead of him, and knew he couldn't count on a transplant to save him. It was a possibility. Not a guarantee.

He laid there in a daze, plowing through the book despite not absorbing a single word, until he heard Mom come home from work. It was only a matter of time before she found out what they learned and dashed in here. Steve put down the book and waited. He didn't expect to hear a strangled gasp and the unmistakable clatter of broken glass coming from the kitchen. Mom was easily startled, so he wasn't overly concerned, but he still got up and walked over to make sure everything was okay and to help clean up. She hadn't moved to start picking up shards of glass; instead, she stood stock still beside the kitchen table, one of the papers from the stack they'd brought home from clinic clutched in her hand.

"Mom? You okay?" Steve asked. He stepped close enough to read the packet she held up and also noticed the tears streaming freely down her face as she gaped at it in stunned silence. Oh. Dr. Erskine surely mentioned including that document, but Steve must not have internalized it. Mom held an advance directive form. His advance directive form—or it would be, as soon as they filled it out. This was really happening. The inevitability that had sat on the horizon from the day of his birth had finally descended upon them. Cystic fibrosis had a knife pressed to his throat, and this little piece of paper would ensure that once it made the cut Steve could die the way he wanted to.

Ignoring the glass shards scattered about her feet, Steve stepped forward and wrapped his arms around his mother. Her knees buckled and he barely managed to stop her from plummeting straight to the floor. Two big steps backward, and they were far enough away from the glass that he felt comfortable sitting them both down against the wall. She wrapped her right arm around his narrow shoulders and with her other hand pressed his head down to rest in the nook between her neck and shoulder before burying her face in his hair.

Steve, despite being way too old for this degree of motherly affection, just let it happen. She needed him close right now. And frankly, he wanted her close too. Mom worked so hard for eighteen years to keep him as healthy as possible, and now came the cruel moment when CF laughed and told her it wasn't enough. No amount of effort on anyone's part could have stopped it, but Steve knew she was already rehashing his entire life and wondering where she could've done better. "I love you," she whispered almost reverently.

"I love you too. And I'm sorry I just left that paper on the table for you to find. I should have been more tactful about it."

"It's okay. I probably would have reacted the same either way. Are they listing you?"

Steve hummed in confirmation.

"Did they say how long…without one?"

"Two years."

She held him even tighter and openly wept into his hair.

~0~

Steve told no one of the fateful news he'd just received. Not even Bucky. He was so excited for senior year, especially since he'd be back on the field for soccer games after so long on the bench, and the last thing Steve wanted to do was yank him back down to Earth right as he was finally taking off. He buried the news deep in his soul and tried not to let his gaze linger too long on clocks or calendars.

Before he started school again, he and his parents sat down to fill out the advance directive. None of them wanted to, because to fill it out was to grant meaning to it, to accept that they might need it in the near future, but it was a necessary evil. Steve was eighteen and legally an adult, so his parents had to defer to his choices. Even if he were still a minor, he suspected they'd let him make his own calls.

He named his parents as proxies, naturally. They knew him and his wishes better than anybody else, except maybe Bucky. But Steve would never burden him with that responsibility unless he had no other choice. He didn't like sitting at the table filling out the form while his parents just sat and watched, clearly trying not to cry, so he offered the paper to them and requested they ask him the questions. This way, it was more like a conversation than a transcription of the end of his life.

Mom took one look at the piece of paper and handed it off to Dad. "If you should be in an incurable or irreversible mental or physical condition with no reasonable expectation of recovery, do you want your life to be prolonged?" he asked. Steve hated the formal language of the document—this was his life they were talking about, not a couch they were having shipped—but he understood the necessity of the legal jargon.

"No," he said. His death was already drawn-out enough as it stood.

"Specifically, do you want cardiac resuscitation?"

"No."

"Mechanical ventilation?"

"Definite no."

"Artificial nutrition and hydration?"

"I don't know. I guess that depends on the situation."

"Okay. This section is just for things you're strongly against, so if you don't know we can leave it blank."

"Okay."

"What about pain management?"

"What about it?"

"It's phrased as an exception. You consent to pain relief even if it hastens your death, except in the circumstances you state."

"I don't want to be so doped up I'm not coherent," he said. This he had actually thought about before. He didn't want to spend his last moments lost in a fuzz of painkillers. "I want to be able to say goodbye."

"Okay." Dad's gaze lingered on him for an unusually long time before he scribbled that down. He cleared his throat. "The organ donation section is kind of irrelevant."

"I guess so." Steve sighed. He wished he could propagate some good in the world as he left it, but there was nothing in him they could use. After Carol, he actually looked it up, an unfortunate result of grief-fueled decision making. They could take his eyes, and that was it. He didn't want to see the look on his mother's face if he even suggested to consenting to that. So he told them that, since they couldn't use it to save lives, he didn't want them to take anything.

"Have you thought about what you would want your funeral to look like?" Dad asked. Steve was surprised at his composure, and also immensely grateful for it. They needed at least one of them to keep a level head through all this, and Steve didn't think he could keep it up by himself.

"Not really," he admitted. "Except for that I don't want that one Bible verse people always read at funerals."

"Psalm 23?" Mom asked.

"Probably. I think…I'd prefer if people spent time reading things written…for me. Not just a verse from a book for everyone. No offense, Mom."

She smiled painfully. "None taken. This is for you, not me."

"Not exactly. I think it's as much for you, and everyone else, as it is for me."

"Okay. What about after? Where do you want to be?"

"Somewhere." He blurted it out without thinking, but he just immediately knew that he wanted to be somewhere, not just scattered in the wind. He wanted people to have a place to go if they needed him, just as he'd gone to visit Carol. There wasn't a place in the world that he frequented enough to have a presence there, except for maybe Gravesen, but he didn't want a hospital to be the only place people could remember him by.

"So you want to be buried?"

"Yes."

"Know what you want to wear?"

"I don't know. You guys can pick that. It's not like I'll ever have to see it." He didn't mean it to be humorous, but he found himself chuckling after the comment.

"Is there anything you want to bring with you?"

He shook his head. The only thing that came to his mind was Carol's blanket, but as soon as he considered it, he realized he detested the idea. That blanket needed to stay here to comfort the people who would miss him, the way it had comforted him whenever he missed her. "Give the flag blanket to Bucky," he said.

"Okay. Anything else? We can always revisit this later."

"They have every right to say no, but…if they agree, can my friends be the pallbearers? I don't want you to have to do it, Dad."

"What if I want to?"

That caught him off guard. "Do you?"

Dad's shoulders slumped. "I don't know. And I don't think I will know until it's too late." Mom clasped his hand in hers and gave it a reassuring squeeze.

"That's okay," Steve said. He knew going through this paperwork would be depressing, but he hadn't anticipated just how depressing. "If they're okay, I want it to be Bucky, Timmy, Jim, Gabe, Tony, and Parker." Steve hoped his parents didn't have to ask them that question in the near future, but of course the only reason they were doing this right now was because they might have to. "Can we be done for now?"

"Yes. I think that's everything, except for the legal formalities."

They didn't let him leave before giving him excessively long hugs. Steve retreated to his room and listened to Carol's voicemails. The one possible silver lining to this whole shitshow was that he might only have to spend two more years without her, Clint, and Scott.

~0~

Steve didn't tell his friends about the two-year timer on his life, but he did tell them he got added to the transplant list. But that in itself informed them about his rate of decline. They didn't ask how long, and he didn't tell, but they exchanged a silent understanding that, without a transplant, it was much shorter than any of them would have wanted.

Bucky was the only one who noticeably changed. He'd already been skipping out on big outings with their friends, but now it seemed he didn't want to do anything that didn't involve Steve, except for soccer practice. It worried him. He worried that Bucky was only growing more attached by the day, and that he would lose all his other friends just in time to lose Steve. Almost every day, he tried to encourage Bucky to go to the park with Gabe or to parties with the soccer team, but he always waved Steve off and insisted he didn't want to. His constant presence made Steve feel even more like he was dying, but he didn't know what to say without revealing too much. If he gave Bucky the number, he'd only get clingier, and Steve refused to let that happen.

He was in the middle of his third treatment of the day, worrying about this very subject, when they got the call. It had only been two and a half months since he got listed, so Steve and his father were not mentally prepared at all. But fortunately, they had a hospital bag always packed. They arrived at Gravesen within an hour, and called nobody except Mom. There was always a possibility it wouldn't happen, as they'd been warned countless times by the transplant team. Still, Steve's heart sat in his throat the entire time.

They admitted him and explained everything that would go down in the next hours. As an adult, he even signed the consent forms himself. That was frankly the craziest part of the experience for Steve. For his entire life, his parents had to sign things for him. Mom arrived ten minutes after he signed the forms, and wrapped him up in a hug so tight he couldn't breathe. Another forty minutes passed with no news, but also none of the prep procedures. Then the same doctor who'd taken the consent forms walked in with a noticeable slump in his shoulders.

The lungs were no good.

It took them a few minutes to really internalize that information. This was nothing more than a dry run. No new lungs, no new lease on life, just more of the same waiting game they'd already been playing. That approximate two-year timer Dr. Erskine had warned Steve about now stood at twenty one months.

"Good thing we didn't call anybody else," Steve said in an attempt to lighten the mood. He couldn't imagine how much more disappointed he'd be if he'd gotten all his friends and family excited for nothing.

"And now we know sort of what to expect for next time," Mom added.

Next time couldn't come soon enough.