"We have to get him out of here."
Natasha turns, noticing the shift in Steve's tone. "You know him?"
Steve doesn't respond, too busy looking Caleb over, trying to assess if there's anything life-threatening. "Just help me get him up."
Natasha nods, but speaks into her comm. "Stark, we need an evac at the drop off point. Bring the med team we've got an injured man."
Her words blur into a haze. The loudest sound in this damned night if the sound of his heart beating against his ears.
There's so much blood. It's dribbling from a crack in his skull and soaking the ground from deep gashes in his thigh and his side. He looks more dead than alive.
All that runs through his head is the image Steve had conjured up all those years ago, when he received that letter. Of a brave soldier in the snow with blue lips and a hole through his chest.
Somehow this is worse, this Caleb, dying again in this nightmarish place that the Avengers have yet to begin to understand. This is not the image Steve learned to live with all those years ago. This is not what Steve eventually realized was not his fault.
If Caleb dies now, when Steve is there to save him, it will be his fault.
He leans down, slipping one arm under Caleb's shoulders, and gently lifts him off the ground. The movement elicits a pained groan from the injured man. Steve brings his other arm under his legs, fully carrying him.
"You good?" Natasha asks.
Steve nods, and so they work their way to the drop off point, heart pounding in his chest. He realizes how surreal this all seems, and he half expects to look down and Caleb's face morph into a stranger's. It doesn't though. It is Caleb's face, torn and bloody, with that faint scar across his temple caused by a stray baseball when they were no more than twelve.
Steve wonders if Caleb will recognize him if, no when, he wakes, or if he will regard Steve like Bucky did, as a ghost of a memory he cannot quite grasp.
