I'm back! Thank you for your patience. Hopefully this cliffhanger resolution makes up for the long wait. My plan is to post a chapter today, and one tomorrow, and then I'll be back on schedule. Enjoy!

Steve XIV: Seventy Years

Usually, upon waking from a dream, one awakened with the realization that it was all imagined. Not this time. Steve came to feeling physically and intrinsically that it was all real, if only in a special sense of the word. "Not yet," he thought again. The sense of relief that overcame him was potent enough to bring tears to his eyes. Steve cried silently, the all-too-familiar endotracheal tube preventing him from vocalizing. A gentle hand dabbed the tears from his cheek and soothingly shushed him.

"You're back." Mom's voice, he recognized. She was always there to greet him in moments like this. "You were gone for so long…we were prepared to let you stay." Steve heard the grief in her voice, a stark reminder of why he'd chosen this path. If he could save his mother from that pain, he would continue to do so for as long as humanly possible. Maybe even super-humanly.

The vision lingered in his memory with a vividness uncharacteristic of dreams. Steve wondered…if he'd made a different decision there, if he'd followed the blur instead of resisting its inviting warmth, would he have woken up today? Though he had no way of proving it, Steve just knew that was the truth. He didn't tell anyone about it, even when the doctors approved his extubation and returned his oxygen—now set at a higher flow rate to keep his sats up. Everything he'd seen and done there was not for them to know. All they needed to know was that he was still here and still kicking, albeit more slowly and feebly than before.

His port had gotten infected, a situation which, coupled with the existing fungal infection, had rapidly devolved into sepsis. Steve had missed seven days, which explained the size of the bags under his parents' eyes. Bucky's too. It might as well have been seventy years. "Aren't you…supposed to be…at school?" Steve asked him, hating how hoarse his voice still sounded and how he needed to pause for breath after only a few words.

"I told my teachers it was a family emergency," he answered.

"You lied?"

"No, I didn't," Bucky said knowingly.

"Fair enough," Steve sighed. By all standards except blood, they were family. And frankly, shared genetic code was probably the least meaningful standard. Glancing at the table beside his bed, he noticed his mother's rosary, a reminder of just how dire the situation had been. The full-body ache and acidic burning in his lungs also helped.

Bucky almost choked on his next words. "They—they said that…on paper…you shouldn't have survived this."

"But I did," Steve said with an attempt at a smile.

"Yeah, you stubborn bastard."

Steve remembered what Bucky said to him before the ambulance: "You are not dying on me mere minutes after we make up." Thinking of Bucky carried him through that fight with Death. Despairingly, Steve wondered, if they hadn't made up, if he'd faced his own end of days while still locked in a vicious argument with his best friend, would he have fought just as hard for the chance to make amends, or would he have just given up, not knowing if Bucky would even be there for him if he awoke?

~0~

They bumped him up on the transplant list. Any lobes of his lungs that had functioned satisfactorily before had been ravaged by the fungus. He'd also gained two new scars: one where the chest tube had been placed to fix his collapsed lung and another opposite his existing port scar where they'd placed a new one. On the bright side, the anti-fungals appeared to be working—but that didn't mean he felt better. If anything, the drugs made him feel worse. His potassium levels plummeted, requiring almost constant supplement through his IV. It burned like nothing he'd ever felt before. The intense dosages required to keep his lung infection in check started to eat away at his liver function, and he felt more generally sick than he ever had in his life. Steve wanted nothing more than to curl up and sleep until it was all over. As grateful as he was for having survived such an ordeal, he really didn't want to be here.

The nurses tried to talk him around, and even Dr. Wilson paid him a visit, but Steve wanted nothing to do with any of them. Practically the only people he spent the energy to talk to were his parents and Bucky. "I resign as class president," he croaked to Bucky after a grueling hour of relentless muscle cramps. For the past year, he'd barely had the energy to keep up with his duties. There was no way he'd be able to accomplish anything now. It would be better for the students if he just surrendered the position so Jasper could officially take over and get stuff done.

"Okay," was all Bucky said.

"I'm so tired," he told his dad at two o'clock in the morning, too uncomfortable to fall asleep.

"Want me to get a nurse and see if they can't give you something that might help?" he asked. Throughout Steve's long history of hospital stays, Dad had always stayed up with him when he couldn't sleep.

"Not like that," he amended. "I'm tired of fighting."

"I know you are, Steve, but that means it's a battle worth fighting."

"I just…I want my life to stop getting harder."

"Me too. But I'm afraid neither of us can do anything about that." They both knew a transplant was the only thing that could save him. Until that day arrived—if it ever did—things would indefinitely become more difficult. Steve hated that his life depended on someone else's death, but he couldn't do a single thing about it.

When he finally got to change out of his hospital gown, he put on the FU CF shirt that Tony had bought him for Christmas. Mom didn't say a word when she saw it, didn't so much as look at it disapprovingly. Though he'd never heard her curse aloud, Steve knew she agreed with the shirt's sentiment.

~0~

Steve had never faced a more grueling recovery, not even after that drug trial nearly paralyzed him. The fungal infection continued to ease with the administration of the worst drug Steve had ever encountered, but getting rid of it made his lungs burn and his cough taste like wet dirt and rot. He kept bringing up black chunks of mold, and it terrified him even though he knew it was better out than stuck inside clogging up his airways. Steve didn't even make it home from the hospital until nearly Christmas, and the collapsed lung happened back in late October.

Incapable of even walking from his bed to the front door without growing frighteningly short of breath, Steve resigned himself to finishing high school from home. Now that he actually faced it, he remembered why he fought so hard against homeschool when his parents proposed it several years ago. Schoolwork was boring enough as it was, but slogging through it without constantly commiserating with his friends and classmates drained him almost as much as breathing did. His friends visited every weekend and some days after school, but he still missed them all day. He missed Bucky.

His back and shoulders ached all the time now from misusing them to help expand his chest cavity with each breath, and his PFT refused to budge from a dismal twenty three percent. Every morning, Steve woke up feeling like he was drowning—after waking up multiple times throughout the night from the same sensation. Just existing was exhausting.

Dr. Erskine and Dr. Wilson agreed that he needed to be put on anti-depressants.

He didn't tell any of his friends about them, and of course nobody noticed a few extra pills in the handfuls he already took every day. Steve wasn't embarrassed, he'd known Bruce long enough to understand that depression was not something to be ashamed of, but he didn't want anyone to worry or think that he was giving up the fight. To give up now, after he'd bodily clawed his way from Death's clutches, would be an insult. Steve had no intention of giving up, but he still wished every morning that he didn't have to work so hard just to make it back to bed at night.

The one thing he had to look forward to was prom. Since it was in the spring, Mom and his doctors were allowing him to go. Steve and his friends agreed to go together, given none of them had dates anyway. However, in order to purchase tickets, they had to attend a mandatory assembly at school on Friday. Dad dropped him off just before the presentation started and took him and all his friends home afterwards so they could spend time together.

"I cannot believe we had to sit through that just to be allowed to go to prom," Jim lamented. "We are literally seniors in high school. We got that same lecture every year of middle school health class. Actually, we got a more in depth lecture every year of middle school health class. They didn't even cover STDs in this one. It's ridiculous."

"They suspect a lot of people will be drunk, and when a lot of people are drunk a lot of people do stupid things," Brock pointed out.

"I'm pretty sure I was only conceived because my parents were drunk at prom," Timmy said.

"No way!" Gabe exclaimed.

Timmy shrugged. "That's the way they like to tell it. But I'm pretty sure that was just the night they decided they liked each other enough to get married. I wasn't actually born nine months after prom."

"Okay, good. Because that would be insane," Bucky said. "I still find it hard to believe that guy could look out at all of us in the auditorium and think, 'Yes, the odds of teen pregnancy are strong with these ones.'"

"He was probably looking at the football team," Gabe huffed.

"Well it wouldn't exactly be fair for them to single out people to go to this assembly," Timmy remarked. "So they just forced it on all of us."

"I still think it should have been optional. Where are those papers that parents can sign to exempt you from this sort of thing?" Jim questioned.

"Come on, it wasn't that bad," Steve said. Was it the most exciting thing he'd ever listened to? Hell no. But was it probably necessary for a decent-sized proportion of Hudson Creek students? Yes.

"Okay then. Riddle me this, Mr. Righteous. Did you, Steven Grant Rogers, personally benefit from this two-hour lecture on how to prevent prom night from populating the planet?" Jim asked.

Steve rolled his eyes at the exaggerated formality of the inquiry. He answered honestly, "No. But that's only because it doesn't apply to me."

"Hey, you never know," Brock encouraged. "It's prom, anything could happen."

"That's…not what I meant."

"Then what did you mean?" Bucky asked.

"Even if the opportunity presents itself, I'm not going to accidentally father any children."

"Why not?"

"I don't have the equipment," he said with a shrug. Steve hadn't expected this conversation to become so awkward so quickly, but he'd dug himself so deep into this hole that he couldn't climb out. He remembered the first time they brought this subject up at clinic, not long after his fourteenth birthday. Mom made fun of him for weeks afterward about how red his ears turned. Steve realized that he should have been more specific when all five of his friends looked at him in utter horror.

Jim dared to speak first. "You don't have…which equipment?"

Steve could have laughed. Based on their facial expressions, he could've just announced he didn't have eyeballs. A part of him wanted to let them wonder for just a little longer, but he decided that would be cruel. "Relax, you morons. It's all there, it's just not connected. It's a CF thing," he explained. "It's called CAVD."

"That's a CF thing?" Bucky said disbelievingly.

"Yeah. It's actually the only thing guys with CF are practically guaranteed to have. Ninety nine percent of us are just born without vas deferens, but a lot of the other symptoms depend on your specific mutation."

"That's nuts," Timmy remarked. His choice of phrase sent Steve over the edge, and he started laughing the kind of laugh he knew his lungs couldn't withstand for long. Bucky reached over and turned up the rate on his oxygen concentrator when it continued long enough to render him short of breath. A minute or two of rattling coughing later, and he composed himself enough to reset it to his prescription level. It was worth it; he could practically feel the endorphins racing through his body. This was not a moment he would forget anytime soon.

"So you can never have kids?" Bucky confirmed.

"Not naturally." Steve didn't know why they'd told him this at age fourteen, when having children was nowhere on his radar. "If I ever wanted to, I'd have to have surgery."

"Damn. Is there any part of you that CF doesn't touch?" Brock asked genuinely.

"My brain," Steve answered.

"Yeah, you're stupid of your own accord," Bucky quipped.

"Shut up."

~0~

Steve didn't particularly love school dances or crowded places in general, but the principle of attending his senior prom motivated him. He craved that normal high school experience since he'd been robbed of just about every other aspect of senior year. Bucky and him agreed to wear complementary ties: Bucky's purple and Steve's gold for the awareness ribbon colors for CF and pediatric cancer.

Both his and Bucky's mom took inordinate amounts of photographs of the five of them. Timmy insisted on carrying Jim piggyback-style for some of them; Steve thought that was pretty on brand for those two. Gabe lovingly rolled his eyes at their antics, but this kind of nonsense was exactly what Steve loved about them. They also made a bow tie just for his oxygen tank, insisting it also had to comply with the dress code. Steve insisted on a few photos without it, though, because he wanted his friends to be able to look back at these in seventy years or so and not have every single one remind them how sick he was.

Steve didn't need a picture to remind him, especially when he had a dance floor full of able-bodied teenagers before him. Each and every one of them had their entire lives ahead of them, whereas he could only hope for a stranger to save his before it was too late. He tried not to focus on that, instead soaking up every moment of fun with his closest friends, but it was impossible to banish from his mind entirely.

"I'm glad you're here," Bucky told him when a short break between songs allowed them to speak and be heard without shouting. Steve couldn't tell if he meant here as in at prom or here on this Earth, but it didn't matter. He would happily stay in either place for as long as he possibly could if Bucky wanted him there.

Yes, that statistic about CAVD and CF is true, believe it or not. Also, I promise next chapter is emotionally lighter and far more fun than this past stretch.