This chapter is one of my personal favorites. Everybody loves a healthy dose of fluffy nonsense.
Bucky XV: Amputeam
Steve pulled through. But he was…changed. Not just physically weaker, but mentally and emotionally exhausted. Watching him attempt to come back from that ordeal was one of the hardest things Bucky had ever done. He remembered his own grueling journey returning to soccer after cancer treatment. Steve worked just as hard, but merely to regain basic abilities like walking across a room or taking a shower, and it was impossible for him to hide his discouragement.
The eventuality that they'd both fought against going into high school was upon them. Even months into his recovery, Steve was too weak to go to school for real. Bucky spent his senior year without his best friend by his side, and though he knew Steve was still very much alive and just working through his graduation requirements from home, he couldn't help but think that this was just a taste of what the future held.
Official word from the Amputee Soccer Association and UVA arrived via mail and email at the beginning of February. They wanted him on the team as starting goalie. Mom cried when he handed her the letters. After she read them, Bucky took them back and walked over to the Rogers to show Steve. He demanded a celebratory hug and rambled for as long as his lung capacity would allow about how excited he was for Bucky.
After Bucky's eighteenth birthday, his third Stump-iversary, and his two year and nine months scans coming back clear as ever, Steve proposed the tattoos. Bucky leapt on the idea. He loved having this permanent reminder of their friendship, and he found himself resting his hand over the spot on his ribcage whenever he laid down to fall asleep at the end of the day.
Steve made it to prom. The five of them went together without dates—and in an unexpected turn of events Brock ended up taking Jennifer—but they ended up staying barely half the time because they were all bored and Steve was exhausted. Still, Bucky happily filed that memory away as part of his normal high school adventures. Although considering that Jim and Timmy requested some 1940s jazz song and broke out into a choreographed swing routine in the middle of the dance floor, maybe "normal high school adventures" wasn't the right label. During that song, Bucky was torn between watching his friends dance and watching Steve's face light up as he watched them and tapped his foot off beat.
Graduation filled him with a similar sense of gratefulness and accomplishment. Steve made it there too, and he walked across the stage without even having to pause for breath. Bucky's mom sewed a large pocket to the inside of his gown so he could stow his diploma and have a hand free to shake hands with the principal. Despite the rocky start, Bucky couldn't be happier with the course of his high school career. In fact, the rough beginning only forced him to more deeply appreciate all the moments that came after. Now he dared look forward to the next adventure.
Josiah Bradley, one of the kids Bucky met last summer at amputee soccer camp, got the same UVA soccer scholarship as him. The two had kept in touch throughout senior year of high school and, when they both learned of their acceptance, they decided to be roommates. As far as decisions Bucky made during this time period went, that was certainly the easiest. Even easier than accepting the scholarship. Because, while it was an amazing opportunity, leagues better than any of his other options, it would send him all the way down to Virginia for most of the year. That was a long way to go. He worried about things that might happen while he was away.
"Relax, Bucky, I'm going to be fine," Steve assured him for the ten thousandth time. "I'll just be chilling here getting my degree online and waiting for the good Samaritan who's going to save my life to reach the end of theirs."
"That's one way to put it," Bucky sighed. Ever since the fight, they'd been way more open to discussing the ideas of transplant and death, because letting those thoughts air out served them better than letting them simmer, but it was still crazy to think that Steve's life really did depend on someone else's death. Bucky knew his friend wasn't taking any risks, but he was still reluctant to leave him. When he was younger and had to go to Camp McCoy every summer, his first few nights over there always ended in him waking up panting from another nightmare about one of Steve's asthma attacks. That was one of the reasons he'd hated going so much. He worried something would happen to Steve and he wouldn't be there to help. If he got the call for new lungs while Bucky was at school, how long would it take Bucky to get back to New York to see him? Or, if heaven forbid the worst happened, Bucky didn't want to hear that news over the phone.
"Please don't make this vital decision about your future based on your fears about mine," Steve begged him. Bucky knew he was right, and he ultimately accepted the scholarship. That summer after senior year, Bucky spent every free moment he had—with his training schedule, it wasn't nearly enough, but he savored each moment all the more because of it—with Steve. They didn't do anything special, since Steve really couldn't get out of the house much anyway, but just being together was all they needed to have a great time. As revenge for making him watch Five Feet Apart all those years ago, Steve forced Bucky and the guys to watch Soul Surfer. Bucky didn't react to the shark attack, despite its goriness, but the scene where she woke up in the hospital without her arm made him so nauseous he had to step out. Fortunately, none of his friends drew any attention to the fact he'd clearly been triggered except to ask if he was okay. If they freaked out about it, it would've only made him feel worse.
"You think you could learn to surf?" Gabe asked him.
"I could ask Thor to teach me," Bucky replied. "But more importantly, you think Bethany Hamilton could learn to goalkeep? I'll bet she'd be killer."
As a fall sport athlete, Bucky got to move in earlier than most of the students. Which meant summer came to a close far sooner than he would've liked. Saying goodbye to Steve was even harder than he worried it might be. They promised to FaceTime at least every other day and Bucky swore Steve to honesty about his health. Bucky vowed to get his ass back to Brooklyn as fast as humanly possible at the first sign of trouble.
"You're going to be great," Steve told him.
"You too."
He would never forget the hug they exchanged that day. They'd never been shy when it came to embracing each other in times of excitement, sorrow, or anything in between, but this hug came charged with more emotion than any that came before. Bucky didn't want to let go. But, inevitably, he had to, and less than eight hours later he stood in the middle of the tiny dorm room that would be his home for the next year.
Mom and Dad helped him unpack, and they lost themselves in the work to postpone the inevitable tearful goodbyes. Well, Bucky suspected his mom would be the only one to cry, but he wasn't looking forward to watching it. At last, there were no more clothes to put away, no more desk supplies to stow, and no more soccer gear to double check. Bucky faced his parents and awaited their farewells.
Mom skipped the speech and dove right into a hug. "I'm so proud of you," she said. "I can't wait to hear about all your college adventures."
"I'll tell you all about them," he promised.
"You'd better," Dad said with a quirk of his lip.
"Get your homework done, go to bed on time, and for the love of God don't exhaust yourself at practice," Mom said sternly.
"Okay, Mom."
"I love you."
"Love you too."
"We'll call you when we get home."
"Okay."
"And you'll either call us or answer the phone when we call at least once a week or so?" she asked hopefully.
"Of course." After everything they'd been through, Bucky knew how much it meant to his parents for him to being going away to live a normal college student life. He owed it to them to share some of that experience. This was one thing cancer hadn't taken from him, so Bucky planned to seize it with gusto. Mom and Dad stepped back into the hallway, waving goodbye.
Mom's parting advice to him: "Use protection!"
Bucky called, "Love you, Mom," before closing the door and opening the next book in the series of his life.
Bucky had shared a room with Josiah before, during that brief period of training out in California, so he knew it wouldn't be all that difficult to adapt to living alongside another person. After spending so much time in Steve's room, he was used to extra equipment, so Josiah's amputee stuff didn't faze him. He needed more than Bucky did to get by independently; evidently missing a leg presented more challenges than missing an arm. Bucky only brought his suction cup scrubber, a few sharpened forks, and extra storage for clothes because he didn't like to hang his shirts. With the left sleeves sewn shut, they didn't fit on normal hangers, and the ones with clips were too much of a hassle. It was easier just to fold things. And without his mother there to monitor his every move, "fold" came to mean "shove in a drawer."
Within the first week, they both came to a mutual realization: living with each other was bizarre, confusing, and often downright ridiculous. Bucky learned more in that first week from Josiah than any of his professors or other peers. He also laughed. A lot. Their first Saturday morning, the soccer team invited them to brunch before afternoon practice. Bucky had to yell at Josiah to hurry up and pick a leg already when he spent ten minutes deliberating over whether to wear a foot to look inconspicuous or a blade to look more athletic. They both found the incident endlessly hilarious for whatever reason. Over time, more incidents like that occurred, resulting in countless inside jokes for the two of them.
It took a drunk two A.M conversation after a rager of a soccer party for them to decide to share that experience with the world.
The next day (when they'd sobered up) they created an Instagram account in both their names with the handle Amputeam. With permission from Coach Lamberg, they affiliated it with the American Amputee Soccer Association. After almost two hours of back and forth, they decided on a bio: "Three arms. Three legs. One brain cell." They agreed that summarized their lives pretty succinctly.
It began as little more than a collection of poorly designed memes about the nonsense they confronted living with each other, followed only by their friends and teammates from amputee soccer, but it quickly gained popularity for…absolutely no discernible reason. They both had access to the account, so they took turns creating content. Bucky's first post was a picture of Josiah's sock drawer—which contained only unpaired solid color socks, a few spare prosthetic liners, and a shrinker sock. Josiah explained that he didn't wear socks on his prosthetic foot, so he had no need to keep them paired up. "It's a perk of being an amputee: a pair of socks lasts twice as long."
Bucky's caption read, "Good thing socks don't come in left and right," accompanied by several hashtags related to amputee life. A few days later, Josiah created the perfect companion piece. He filmed a brief video of him folding Bucky's socks for him with the caption, "Lending a hand" and a winky emoji. They gained nearly two hundred followers after that.
Through the magical network that was social media, word of their shenanigans reached every corner of the amputee and disability community. Other amputees often added their posts to their stories, including on a few memorable occasions famous Paralympians. People neither Bucky nor Josiah had ever met started direct messaging them to thank them for their "Refreshing sense of humor," "Relatable content," and "Reminder that disability is about cans and not just can'ts."
By midway through their first semester together, they'd reached almost eight thousand followers.
In November, they started a series of posts entitled, "How to Make Your Roommate Late For Class." Every post contained the disclaimer, "No classes were actually missed during the aftermath of this post. We filmed this on a Saturday morning and put everything back to normal afterwards." It began with Josiah untying Bucky's shoes. Then Bucky set up an elaborate obstacle course between Josiah's bed and his crutches. They went back and forth for a solid six or seven rounds, but by round four they'd devolved from amputee-specific antics to things that would make anyone late; including hiding each other's backpacks in their dorm's overhead storage, changing alarm clock settings, putting raw eggs inside Bucky's shoes, filling Josiah's water bottle with sand, and memorably, a note stuck on the dresser drawer that read, "All your shirts are dirty. Don't ask why. I'll be back from the laundry room in an hour. On second thought, maybe two. XOXO Bucky." The comments on that last one were ridiculous.
When Bucky went home for Thanksgiving, he made a post featuring Steve, which the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation then reposted. At first Bucky was blown away and could not comprehend why they decided to repost it, but Steve said they often reposted things that their followers shared about life with CF. Within days after that, almost half the following of CF Foundation—about twenty thousand people—also started following them too. He was blown away all over again. Bucky didn't understand why twenty thousand CFers wanted to hear his and Josiah's bullshit on a regular basis, but he wasn't about to contest it.
In December, he put jingle bells on Josiah's crutches, "To discourage sneaking around and encourage Christmas spirit." They stayed there until about twenty minutes into soccer practice when Coach made him take them off before anyone went insane. What put them over the top, however, was a killer prank Josiah pulled the week before finals.
Bucky woke up on a Tuesday morning forty minutes before his ten o'clock class to find the floor of their dorm room entirely covered in LEGOs. Every. Square. Inch. He discovered this when he threw his legs over the side of the bed—which was lofted like all beds in tiny dorm rooms to maximize storage—and hopped down. The string of obscenities that spilled from his mouth would have made Steve's mother jam a bar of soap between his teeth. He concluded with, "Oh, you bastard." Josiah stood in front of his desk, phone still aloft from recording the whole thing, leaning on one crutch and his prosthetic foot. His good foot, the only one that could feel pain, was held aloft to avoid contact with the minefield he'd created.
"If we're going to post this, I need a friend to edit it and censor your foul mouth," he remarked.
"Fuck you," Bucky spat. "Where did you even get this many LEGOs?"
"An engineering class."
"And how exactly are you planning to clean them up?"
"Me? Clean them up?"
"Yes you."
"I dunno. I didn't get that far."
"Great." Bucky made the treacherous journey across LEGO infested waters to his shoes and put them on to protect himself from further damage. "I might find this funny when my feet stop hurting."
"I'll wait."
The video Josiah took—well, the heavily censored version of it—got more likes than any of their previous posts. And then it went viral. Many of their followers started calling for Bucky to devise a way to get revenge, some even offering suggestions. Bucky decided not to retaliate, at least for now. He needed to wait until Josiah didn't see it coming.
~0~
Bucky held off until the middle of second semester. By this point, Amputeam had nearly fifty thousand followers. He enlisted the help of several teammates from UVA soccer and together they took the left sleeve of every shirt in Josiah's drawers, flipped it inside out, and pinned it to the inside of the shirt's torso. With the pin mostly hidden in the armpit, at first glance it looked like they permanently modified them like Bucky's shirts.
"Are you kidding me?" Josiah asked when he took out a T-shirt to throw on before bed. He looked at the left side and poked at it. Then he looked through the drawer at all the other shirts. Bucky tried not to snicker and ruin the video's audio. He whipped around and narrowed his eyes at Bucky. "Can you even sew?"
"Yeah."
"You did this?"
"Yep."
"Are you kidding me? How many shirts did you ruin?"
"All of them."
"What? Is this your way of forcing me to donate my entire wardrobe to you?"
"No. I wouldn't be caught dead in half the stuff you wear."
"What the fuck? At least the LEGO thing was reversible."
"I had to go bigger."
"My mom is going to kill me when I tell her I need all new shirts."
"Bummer."
Josiah balled up one of the shirts and threw it right at Bucky's head, and it landed covering the camera. He cut the video and explained that the shirts weren't sewn, just temporarily pinned, and that he would never actually vandalize his property. Josiah conceded that it had been a good prank, but not as good as the LEGOs. Bucky gave him that. The LEGO thing was legendary.
Of all the lines I've ever written for this series, I think, without contest, the best of them all is, "Three arms. Three legs. One brain cell."