Did someone say bonus chapter?
Chapter 3: The Game Plan
Bucky finally reigned in his tears just in time for Steve to arrive and start them flowing all over again. He should've been embarrassed blubbering like a toddler, but he found no room within himself for anything but mind-numbing anguish, petrifying terror, and the morphine-dulled throb in his shoulder.
Steve immediately rushed to his side and wrapped his arms around him, letting Bucky bury his face in his shoulder and continue to cry. They sat there like that for a long time before Bucky's composure returned enough for him to trust himself holding a conversation. The tears still fell, but now silently and without the accompanying full-body sobs.
"I—I don't know what to do, Steve," he spluttered.
"That's okay, Buck. It's all going to be okay."
"No it's not!" Bucky hurled himself back into Steve's embrace.
Steve sighed, coughed, and spoke again, "You're right. It's not okay, and I can't make it okay. But I really wish I could."
"I'm so scared," he muttered barely above a whisper.
"I know. And you have every right to be. This is some of the scariest shit known to man. But the only thing that can combat scary things is courage, and you have more of that than anyone I know."
"Where'd you steal that line from?" Bucky asked as a smirk broke through the tears.
"Nowhere! That was just my motivational speaking skills at their finest."
"I don't believe you."
"Google it. You won't find that quote anywhere."
"You should trademark it," Bucky suggested. "It's a pretty damn good quote."
"I'm glad you liked it because that's all I got," Steve admitted. They released each other and Bucky finally got the chance to see the heartbreak in his best friend's eyes. He was trying so hard not to break down, probably saving it for later when Bucky wasn't there to watch. "You know, this room is right across the hall from the one they usually stick me in. We could be neighbors," Steve said with a chuckle and a quick glance around. Bucky shuddered at the prospect. He'd always been a transient visitor at Gravesen, here only to see Steve and then return to the real world. As much as he didn't want to leave his best friend alone during hospital stays, Bucky always breathed a sigh of relief when he left. This hospital was stifling, and now he faced his own indeterminate imprisonment here.
Steve must've noticed Bucky's negative reaction to his comment because his laughter cut off abruptly and heavy silence ensued. It was broken by a harsh coughing fit on Steve's part, then he spoke again, "Even if I'm not physically here every time you are, I'll be with you every step of the way. You know that, right?"
"Yeah," Bucky sighed. He couldn't meet Steve's eyes because he feared he might start crying again, instead picking at a loose thread in the sheets.
"This is a totally different ball game than CF, but they play by a few of the same rules. I can give you the inside scoop on a lot of things, and I know people that can cover what I can't."
The idea of being shown the ropes of cancer life by one of Steve's hospital buddies repulsed him. Bucky had met a few people Steve knew through Gravesen, but he knew them only as the people his friend spent time with when Bucky wasn't around. They constituted a club Bucky had been perfectly happy to be excluded from, and now Steve wanted to initiate him. Bucky was barely listening at this point, caught up in his own thoughts, but Steve kept rambling. "I'll introduce you to Carol and Clint, and we can catch you up on which nurses not to piss off so you don't have to learn it the hard way. Oh, and we'll get to add your name to the gauntlet—I'll explain that later—and get you into the Gravesen group chat. Man, it's so weird to think about you being a part of those things. We've always shared everything with each other, how crazy is it that we're going to share this place too? You and I are going to have more in common than ever."
"I don't want to be anything like you!" Bucky spat. The horrible outburst came from nowhere, his anger at the situation gathering and redirecting itself right at Steve. He was attempting to twist this into a good thing, and it made Bucky feel sick. This wasn't a fucking bonding experience for the two of them—it was easily the worst thing to ever happen to Bucky. Steve was born sick; he couldn't possibly understand what it was like for Bucky to receive this news and know his entire future hinged on this moment.
Steve stared at him, dumbfounded and stuttered, "I—I'm sorry."
"Just…go," Bucky sighed. "Find my parents and send them back in." Steve hesitated, but he did as Bucky said without another word.
"Did Steve have to leave?" his mom asked as she and his dad reentered the room.
"Not exactly," Bucky muttered.
"What, did you kick him out?" his dad asked jokingly. Bucky threw him a look that told him he'd hit the nail on the head. "Wait, why?"
"I just…realized I'm not in a state to handle company."
"Do you want us to go?"
"No, I asked him to send you back in. I just don't want his company right now."
"Why not? I thought Steve would be the best possible person to help you through this."
"I thought so too, and at first he was really comforting and supportive, but then he kept talking and it almost sounded like…like he was excited for me to be here."
"Bucky, I'm sure that's not true," his mother assured. "He's just as devastated as we all are, I could see it when he told us to come in here."
"You didn't hear him. He was babbling on about all these things I get to be a part of now, and how we're more alike than ever now."
"I didn't realize he was so…forward about it. He shouldn't have said those things and I'm sorry he upset you. But you should try to think about it from his perspective. You two have been friends for ten years, and through all of that you've been there for him every time his health falters, and he's never had an opportunity to repay you for that. Is it unreasonable for him to try and make you feel better by finding a silver lining?
"No," Bucky admitted.
"He's your best friend, he would never be happy that you're sick. He was just trying to find something about this situation that doesn't completely suck."
"You're right." Bucky sighed. "He was just trying to help, and I snapped at him."
"I don't think Joseph's here yet to pick him up, want me to go find him and bring him back?" his father offered. Bucky nodded and within ten minutes, Steve was back in his room looking noticeably more timid than Bucky had ever seen him.
"I'm sorry," they both said at the same time, causing them both to laugh.
"I shouldn't have snapped at you," Bucky said. "I'm just under a lot of stress right now, in case you didn't know that already, and something was bound to break at some point. You happened to be an available target for the fallout."
"I should've realized I was not being helpful," Steve said. "I'm just not used to this…like at all. It's always been the other way around, you here and me there," he pointed to the bed, "And I genuinely have no idea what to do on this side of things."
"I'll help you," Bucky promised with a smile. "Lesson number one: let me complain without trying to fix it—because you can't. I certainly never know what to do when you whine about only feeling half of your lungs, whatever that means."
"What do you think I do when you complain about something soccer-related with terminology I've never heard of?"
"Fair," Bucky conceded. "I'd give you more lessons now, but I think I've reached the cap of my teaching capacity for today."
"That's alright. I'll learn as I go."
"Sounds like a plan."
~0~
Things got really busy after that. Per Steve's advice, Bucky accepted sedation when they offered it for any procedure. He woke up blearily after a bone marrow pull with a dull ache in his hips to accompany the one in his shoulder. Fortunately, they must've found the right drug cocktail because it hadn't come within miles of the level of pain he experienced before.
The primary tumor obviously sat in his shoulder, but they needed to check the rest of his body for hotspots of rapidly-multiplying cells that would indicate the cancer had metastasized. A lot hinged on this, he learned. Not from his team—they provided him only minimal information, likely to avoid scaring him—but from the internet. Survival rates dropped from the mid-eighties to only ten percent if it metastasized.
They pumped him full of radioactive tracer over the course of an hour and a half. He wasn't allowed to move around much so it could settle evenly throughout his body, which was so not fun. The only thing that kept him entertained while the infusion ran was texting Steve progressively more ludicrous messages, knowing he was at school and probably trying to focus.
They're filling me with some radioactive substance to look at all my bones. Do you think they'll show up green on the scans?
Or maybe I'll get superpowers.
Can you imagine? People injecting you with a mysterious substance and getting superpowers? That would be so cool.
More likely I'll just get radiation poisoning.
Have you seen what the radiation did to catfish in Chernobyl? It's gnarly. I saw it on some National Geographic documentary.
Oh god.
Steve, this is important.
Does the hospital get the National Geographic channel?
Before he received any sort of response from Steve, they came to take him for his scan. Which entailed lying absolutely still for an hour. It sucked. There was no more eloquent way to put it. What sucked almost as much was the ungodly number of times he used the bathroom after. They dumped a ton of fluids into his system to flush out the tracer and minimize his radiation exposure. He understood the reasoning, but that didn't make it less frustrating to fight his way through pain med-induced drowsiness to go relieve himself.
Once the results of all the tests came back, Dr. Potts laid out the game plan.
His tumor sat nestled in a particularly difficult spot, in both his humerus and scapula, but it hadn't metastasized. Yet. They needed to work quickly. In the span of two hours, the next year of Bucky's life morphed from a yellow brick road of soccer games, homework, and Friday nights with his friends to a black hole of tests, surgeries, and chemo treatments.
He couldn't go back to school at all during treatment; his immune system would be too fragile to handle continued exposure to anywhere so crowded. He couldn't put too much weight on his left arm or otherwise do any rigorous activity because the tumor compromised its structural integrity and he could easily break it. As if it wasn't fucked up enough already. If that was true, he was shocked the joint hadn't broken already during one of his diving saves.
As far as Bucky could tell from the information presented to him, he couldn't do much of anything for as long as these seventeen rounds of chemo took. Oh, and for the second half of that he'd be able to do even less because the position of the tumor and the sheer number of important structures it was tangled up in meant it couldn't be excised without removing his entire left arm.
Upon hearing that, Bucky knew he'd well and truly cried himself out. Because nothing should have made him weep harder than knowing he was doomed to lose forever the one thing that had been part of his identity for most of his life: goalkeeping. Yet he didn't so much as feel moisture building in the back of his eyes. He just went numb. No one-armed goalie could ever be effective; half the net would be all but completely unguarded.
With the final announcement that his port would be placed the following morning followed by round one of chemotherapy, the doctors left the three Barnes alone to digest everything they'd just been told. None of them could bring themselves to say a word. The silence shattered when Bucky's phone sounded with Steve's text tone:
Yes, Gravesen gets National Geographic.
~0~
"Bucky, you need to let me know what to say to the guys," Steve said over the phone. Bucky had called him when his parents' palpable anxiety grew to suffocating and he'd forced them to go home for the night.
"I know, I know," Bucky sighed.
"They keep asking me where you are and I'm running out of excuses. Have they been texting you too?"
"Yeah."
"Have you responded to any of them?"
"No."
"Well you'd better get on that. You're freaking them out."
"I'll freak them out even more if I tell them the truth."
"That might be true, but you can't exactly hide this from them."
"I just don't know how to tell them."
"I get that. Telling people about my diagnosis is always hard. But it gets easier once they know."
"Really?"
"I swear."
"I don't want to do it over text, but I don't know when I'll see them in person next. Maybe you should just tell them."
"No. I'm not doing this for you, sorry. You need to accept it, and this is a big part of doing that."
"Fine. How about I group FaceTime them, but include you too for moral support?"
"I'm okay with that. I'm going to hang up and I expect that call to come in the next ten minutes, okay? You need to get this over with."
"Fine." Bucky listened as Steve hung up, then took a deep breath. More than anything, he feared how they would react. What if they didn't even want to be his friend anymore? What if they asked questions he couldn't answer, or said something that made him start crying again? Sobbing in front of Steve was one thing, but the rest of them had never seen that side of Bucky before. Hopefully, they wouldn't see it now. He steeled himself and pressed the buttons to call the group.
One by one, the faces of his four best friends popped up and began drifting around the screen. He focused on Steve at first and saw him mouth, "You got this."
"Bucky, you're alive!" Gabe exclaimed. "We were really starting to worry."
Maybe soon they would have to worry about that.
"Yeah, I'm still kicking," Bucky stated, voice devoid of its usual lightness.
"Wait, are you in a hospital?" Jim asked as he scrutinized Bucky's background. He nodded.
"Your shoulder's that bad, huh. Do they have to operate?" Gabe asked.
"Are you gonna be okay?" Timmy added.
Frankly, Bucky couldn't answer that second question. "It's…complicated," he began. His throat seized around the next words and he looked to Steve for reassurance. "I didn't hurt my shoulder, exactly, but something showed up on the scans. They found a tumor called Ewing's sarcoma." He chose to word the explanation in a detached manner, the way a doctor would have described his case. Avoiding the self-condemning phrase "I have cancer" helped him distance himself from it and avoid a breakdown.
"Holy shit, man. That's cancer, isn't it?" Gabe said. Bucky nodded grimly.
"I'm so sorry," Timmy said sincerely. "Is there anything we can do?"
"Yeah, anything," Jim continued.
"Just keep me up to speed on all the Hudson Creek gossip, okay? I'm gonna be out for the rest of year."
"That's a long time," Timmy practically whimpered. They were all used to Steve taking leave from school for treatment, but he'd never been gone longer than a few months. Compared to that, a year felt like forever.
"I know. But I will be back, and I better not find out you've replaced me." He wished that came out with as much confidence as he planned it to.
"Of course not!" Jim assured. "No one else in our entire school could even come close to being as annoying as you are." The sheer normalcy of the comment made Bucky feel a hundred times better. In that moment he knew it was beyond worth it to tell his friends.
"Are you gonna be able to play when this is all over?" Gabe questioned. Just like that, his world came crashing down again. He wanted to lie and say he'd be back on the field as soon as his doctors cleared him, but he couldn't allow himself to perpetuate false hope for Gabe nor for himself.
Bucky shook his head solemnly. "Because of where the tumor is, they…they have to take my whole arm off."
"You'd still be better than half the goalies in the league." Maybe that was true, but Bucky knew it would be unbearable to try and play only to be reminded of what he used to be.
"You'll still have both feet, maybe you can learn to play center back or striker," Timmy suggested.
"Maybe." When he was younger he'd played various positions, but by the time he was nine it was clear he belonged in the net and that's where he'd stayed ever since. He'd really need to hone his skills if he wanted to make the team for any other position, and it wasn't like he could start practicing any time soon.
"You'll figure something out," Steve assured, speaking up for the first time since the conversation began. "Worst case scenario, you retire with the legacy of being the best goalie Hudson Creek's ever seen." When put like that, it didn't sound so bad.
"Can we come visit?" Jim asked.
"I've got kind of a busy week ahead and I have no clue how I'll be feeling," Bucky admitted. "It might be best to wait until round one is over and I get discharged."
"Okay."
"Until then, feel free to text me, but I can't promise I'll respond quickly. And for the love of God, do not get #TeamBucky or #BuckyStrong trending on social media, or I will hit you so hard you end up in here with me."
"So #BattlingForBarnes is okay?" Jim asked. Bucky laughed so hard he nearly dropped his phone. Having these four morons by his side might make this journey that much more bearable.