I don't own the Avengers. Or Bucky Barnes.
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Chapter Three of Four, right here.
Chapter Four... oh boy. The big one is comin' right up. In approximately 48 hours, or maybe a bit less.
Thanks again. Leave me a note if you're enjoying it!
Steve's gone when Bucky wakes up. The pieces slot into place without conscious thought. Where? Home base. Medical bay. Why? Mission. Swiss Alps. Prolonged flashback. Status? Normal. Ish.
He's shivering.
He glances at the monitor for long enough to note his resting heart rate and blood pressure. They're normal enough. He peels the cuff off his arm. Scratches idly at the sticky residue it leaves behind. Leaves the cuff on the bed and crosses to the storage cupboard, where they keep a good stack of one-size-fits-most sweats.
A hot shower takes care of the sleep-fluff left from Wanda's helping hand. He turns the heat up and up and up, but even at near scalding point, he can't stop shivering.
It's been, what, more than seventy years? He should be used to it by now.
He's not.
Steve's waiting when he enters the common room. The others are too, but they don't matter now.
"You're alright?" Bucky asks, standing in front of the couch, close enough to brush against Steve's knees.
If he was anyone else, Steve would protest the invasion of personal space. Bucky isn't anyone else. Not now. He hasn't been for a long time.
"Fine," says Steve. "You're shivering."
"Psychosomatic hypothermia. It'll pass."
Steve nods and blanks the screen he's been staring at. He looks exhausted.
Bucky doesn't comment on the fact that it looked a lot like a camera-view of their medical room. He looks around the room, automatically noting locations and positions, exit points, visible weaponry. "Did I hurt anyone?" He makes sure to direct the question mostly toward Clint and Nat, sitting together at the breakfast bar.
Clint shakes his head.
"No," says Nat. "You didn't hurt anyone." Her mouth frames the words except yourself, but she doesn't say them aloud.
She doesn't need to.
He takes another moment to scan the two of them, using every bit of trickery and visual strategy he knows to take them apart almost down to the molecule and rebuild them. He has to know. If they —
Part of him can hardly bear to think it, because they're his friends, dammit, and friends don't do things like that. But the more dominant part of him is coldly rational, analytical, logical, and it is this part of him that will divine the truth. This part of him that will rip them limb from limb —
If they did it on purpose, if they took him and Steve to that place with any foreknowledge, any hint that they would react as strongly as they had… if it was just a joke, if it was a test, if they'd done it because they wanted to know what would happen…
He will kill them.
"Buck?" Steve asks. He's sitting upright now. Concerned.
"Did you know?" Bucky asks Nat and Clint. He doesn't think they did. They're both good at hiding things when they want to, but right now they're two pages of an open book. He can read the guilt and the apology, the anger at their own ignorance. Neither of them like being caught off guard, not by something like this, something they should have known.
They should have known.
But they hadn't. He doesn't know whose fault that is. Maybe his, for not telling them. Maybe theirs, for not doing the research. Maybe nobody's.
Nat shakes her head.
"No." Clint looks grim. "We had no idea. I'm sorry."
They're speaking the truth. Bucky relaxes. "Don't be. You weren't informed."
"Well," says Tony from his spot in the corner, "actually — "
Someone shuts him up, maybe, but Bucky has stopped listening. He collapses onto the couch beside Steve and slings an arm around him. He needs the contact. They both need the contact.
"What about you?" Steve asks, that concerned little v between his eyebrows. "Are you okay?"
Bucky takes a slow breath. Lets the memories roll over him and wash away again. "I will be."
"What does that mean?" Nat asks. She and Clint have moved from the breakfast bar; they're perched on the armchair beside Bucky, one on each arm, feet mingling on the butt cushion.
"I'll second that," says Bruce. He's sitting beside Wanda and Sam on another couch, hair dishevelled, his socked feet up on the coffee table, to all appearances immersed in his book.
With Bruce, as with all of them, appearances can be misleading.
He shifts his glasses up his nose and looks at Bucky. "What does that mean? Are you relapsing?"
"No," says Bucky. If anything could have set one off, it would have been that. But he hasn't had a relapse since he came out of cryo, and he's not about to start now. "No relapse. I just…" He lifts his metal hand. Watches the light glint off it, the way it moves as he wriggles his fingers, makes a fist, straightens out again. He tries to connect the visual to the sensation, and fails. "My arm hurts."
Steve, predictably, reaches out and puts a hand on his forearm, probing cautiously as if he can diagnose what's wrong with it from touch alone. "I didn't think there were any nerves in there?"
"There aren't. Not in the traditional sense, at least. I mean, it hurt like hell when Stark amputated it that time — "
In the background, Tony mutters something that might be a grumbly and much-repeated apology.
" — but it's never had the same feel to it as my human arm. Anyway, I didn't mean this one. Or that one," he adds, as Steve's eyes flicker to his 100%-Bucky-Barnes-human-flesh right arm.
Bruce's puzzled frown vanishes a second before Wanda's. "Your old arm."
Bucky nods. Grits his teeth against the ghosting tug from a limb that hasn't been attached to him in seventy years. "My old arm. Yes."
Steve eases back. Looks at him curiously. Opens his mouth. Closes it again.
Bucky leans his head against the couch and musters a tired grin. "What?"
"I don't mean to — "
"Steve. What is it?"
"I — What does it feel like? I know it hurts, but… how?"
He turns that over for a minute, trying to decide how to answer it. If he's honest, brutally honest, it feels like bitter failure and mindless fear and pain, so much pain, pain he'd never dreamed he could endure. But he can't tell Steve that. Not if he wants him to sleep at all in the next week.
"Cold," Bucky says eventually. "It feels cold. Not numb-cold. Just… freezing, bone-deep, teeth-aching cold. Like the day we blew the bridge up. That sort of cold."
As it is, that's quite enough. He sees the dark rise in Steve's eyes and tenses, wondering if that alone was enough to… but no. Steve shakes his head like he's shaking off a fly. The dark recedes. "I'm sorry."
Bucky tips his head and stares at him, perplexed. "What?"
"I'm sorry. I never —"
"You've got nothing —"
" — never got the chance to tell you —"
" — to be sorry for, nothing —"
" — I should have grabbed you, I should have stretched just that little bit further and —"
" — Don't be an idiot, Steve, you couldn't have gone any further than you did or you would have fallen, too!"
" — grabbed you, I should have jumped after you and —" Steve stops.
Bucky straightens. Stares at him in dawning horror. "You what."
Steve's gaze flicks away. He shrugs miserably. "I could have survived it. I think."
"No." Too much. It's too much. "You don't. You never think! You didn't think when you picked fights with bully after bully and who had to come and bail you out, huh? I did! If you'd jumped… Steve. No. No. The only way I survived was because Zola had already been doing — things — to me — " Bucky has to turn his head away from the anguish in Steve's eyes, and even thinking about what Zola did to him on that table is enough to make him want to vomit — "and they found me before I succumbed to hypothermia or bled out completely! You've got no idea if you would have survived it!"
"I would have! You don't know what the serum did to me, I would have survived it."
"You would have died!" Bucky's on his feet, looming over Steve, trying to get that through his thick skull.
"You did!" Steve's standing too, chest-to-chest, looking ready to throw the first punch except that's ridiculous, they've never fought with fists, only with words…
Bucky stops. Takes a breath. Slows his heart rate until he's sure the trembling is only from cold, not from anger. "I did," he admits. "I died. In more ways than one."
Steve's face is white.
"And you know what?"
He shakes his head. "What?"
"I'd do it again if it means you survive."
Steve flinches.
Bucky sits back down and drops his head into his hands. He feels the couch sink as Steve sits beside him, feels the tension in the room ease as their impromptu audience switches out of high alert.
"I felt it break, you know," he says.
Steve doesn't say anything.
"My arm." Bucky drops his metal hand and looks at it, turning it this way and that. "I tried to break my fall. It snapped. Here." He touches the inner forearm just down from his wrist. "And here." Another touch near the elbow. "Hurt like… I don't know. A lot."
Beneath the paralysing fear and the flailing terror of his imminent demise, his heart had hurt, too. Because as much as Steve lost Bucky that day… Bucky lost Steve.
"And then I hit an outcrop," he goes on, more matter of fact now. "Hit it hard. It was sharp. Lost my arm. Right here." He draws an imaginary line across his bicep at the precise angle the rock had shorn it off at. "Hit the bottom of the ravine not long after that, I think. Not entirely sure. Went into shock pretty soon, lost consciousness… I thought I knew what pain was." He laughs grimly. "I didn't have a clue."
"Please," Steve whispers. "Stop."
Bucky looks up. At first he's almost puzzled at the sick look on Steve's face, but of course. He's never told him any of this before. All Steve knows of it is the fall, and then Bucky showing up decades later with a metal arm and a psychotic urge to kill his best friend. He throws a glance around the room, absorbing the expressions. Horror, nausea, disgust, pity, morbid curiosity… nothing he hasn't seen before.
They might be superheroes, but the Avengers are as predictable as the next human when it comes to emotion.
"Sorry," he says, not really meaning it. Steve had to know. And it feels something like catharsis on his end.
"You're a punk," says Steve, and hugs him.
"Jerk." Bucky returns the tight embrace.
He's missed this. Even when he didn't know what he was missing, he's missed it. Missed Steve.
But they can't sit around being nostalgic all day. He's got a job to do.
"I need to do something," he says, standing up.
"No," says Steve immediately.
"And I need your help."
"No."
He knows how to win this one. It's too easy. "I'll do it without you. But I would appreciate the help."
Steve gapes at him. Glares at the others when they laugh too loudly. Lets out a breath in defeat. "What is it?"
"Nat. Clint. You too. Actually, all of you might as well come. In the event of anything happening…"
It won't. It won't happen. But he has to try it. He has to know, really know, that even if a flashback cripples him he won't be a danger to others, to Steve, ever again.
"Stark," he says.
Tony waves a hand from the corner. "Uh. Barnes. Yeah?"
"I need to borrow the Other Guy's room."
