Chapter Text
That actually happened.
Steve’s heart was still racing in his chest. He stormed a Hydra prison. He actually stormed a Hydra prison. This whole thing was insane. But somehow it worked. It was real. He kept having to pinch himself as a reminder this wasn’t a dream.
His mind was moving at a thousand miles an hour. He looked round at the soldiers marching beside him, churning up the dust on the narrow dirt road. They were exhausted, battered, hungry, but alive. And actually happy. Granted, it was a cautious, quiet kind of happy, but the looks on their faces ranged from relief to ecstasy. And the way they looked at him. It was pure, unfiltered admiration and gratitude.
That actually made him a little self-conscious. Awe-struck wasn’t often the word he’d use to describe glances from strangers. At best, he’d usually get a sympathetic frown from a pretty girl in the drugstore or on the street. At worst, he’d get a creepily long sneer or even beaten up for whatever reason people managed to find. Bucky always told him it was because he picked a fight with anything that moved, but he knew that wasn’t true. Okay, it wasn’t always true. No, yes, he was right. But he knew being small made a world of difference.
Where was Bucky anyway?
Steve stopped and turned on his heels. He was just here, where could he have gone? He craned his neck slightly to get a better view, and he noticed his friend had fallen behind a few paces. It was so strange being the one to look over the heads of the crowd instead of the one lost in it.
He waited for him to catch up; Bucky wasn’t that far behind. When he managed to sidle over, Steve felt his heart rate settle a little and he inhaled deeply, letting it out in a relieved, breathy, almost-laugh and beaming brightly. It sounded so stupid, but his emotions were just overflowing. He'd proven himself, people were looking at him in admiration, he'd probably saved around four hundred lives, and more importantly, he had Bucky back for the first time in months. He had to explode just a little.
“We did it.” he grinned.
Bucky glanced up at him and smiled back. “Yeah,” he said, letting out a small chuckle, then looked back down at the ground. Something about his laugh seemed forced.
“Hey,” Steve furrowed his brow with concern. He wasn’t sick, was he? If he was, they needed to get to one of the trucks so he could rest. He hadn’t seemed sick before. Did Steve say something wrong?
“You alright?”
Bucky sighed and shook his head indecisively. He was walking slightly hunched over, dragging his leather boots through the dirt of the road, and his eyes seemed glazed and unfocused.
“Don’t worry about me, Steve.” he shook his head again and flashed an unconvincing smile.
Steve nodded and walked a few more paces before turning and stopping in front of his friend, putting a hand on his arm. He’d been on the other side of this game and he knew from experience that is was best not to play it. The parade of tired soldiers parted around them and continued hiking on.
Bucky had been looking sickly before, but by now all the color was drained out of him, making the cuts and bruises on his face and the dark circles under his eyes even more prominent. His eyes were glassy and he carried himself like an overworked horse on his way to be sold for glue.
“Bucky, look at me.” Steve said in a mildly somber tone. Bucky squinted up at him.
Steve closed his eyes and glanced around briefly.
“Bucky,” he lowered his voice and tried his best to maintain eye contact with his friend, who kept losing focus and lowering his gaze to the dirt. “Are you okay?”
It wasn’t a question.
Bucky blinked heavily for a minute, giving off the appearance of a person struggling to overcome extreme pain, keep their last meal down, and stay conscious all at the same time. How hadn’t he noticed this before? It had all seemed to come down on him so suddenly. He’d looked fine ten minutes ago, and Bucky seemed just as surprised by it as Steve.
It was him, wasn’t it? It was because he’d spent all that damn time thinking about himself instead of paying attention to his friend. A little knot of guilt twisted in his stomach.
Bucky opened his mouth a good five seconds before he actually said anything. “Don’t worry about…” Then he shut his eyes suddenly and gasped through his gritted teeth.
“Bucky?”
“I just need to lie down.” he slurred his words, leaning over and resting his hands on his knees. But no sooner did he more or less collect himself than he let out a whimper, twisted sideways, and would have fallen to the dirt if Steve hadn’t caught him first.
“Whoa, whoa, Buck,” Steve said, panic rising in him.
Bucky just let out another groan and held almost painfully tight to Steve’s leather jacket.
“Bucky, Bucky, hey, look at me.” Steve was growing frantic. He turned to get the attention of some of the other soldiers but they had already noticed and were waving for the attention of a doctor if there was one. Probably. He hoped.
“We need a medic over here!” he shouted into the crowd, his voice cracking a little. “Hey, pal, what’s happening?”
Bucky just breathed in quick, shallow succession and shook his head furiously. Other than his sudden clammy paleness, he looked more panicked than anything.
“I need- I need-” he panted, eyes darting. “No, I- alone. I need to be alone. I’m fine.”
Despite his request, he was still clinging to Steve, Steve still holding onto him with all his might. Steve whirled his head round to see if he could spot a medic pushing his way through the crowd, but there was none. No doctors in this entire precession. Great. He looked back down at Bucky.
“Okay,” Steve said, trying and failing to keep at least the appearance of being collected. “Okay, we’ll get you in one of the trucks, okay? Does that sound good?”
Bucky gulped and kept his eyes shut for a few seconds before nodding, but he didn’t move, just stayed limp as a fish except for his death grip on the front of Steve’s jacket. Not seeing many other choices, Steve reached his hands behind Bucky’s knees and lifted him off the ground bridal-style. He carried him a few yards to the nearest truck and peered in the back.
Sitting along the benches on either side of the carriage were four or five tired men in tattered uniforms. He really didn’t want to ask for them to move, but he didn’t see many options.
“Captain!” one of the soldiers perked up.
The men seemed exhausted, but otherwise in good health, so he only had to open his mouth before the one who had addressed him looked from Steve, to Bucky, to his companions, and then nodded at the door. Chatter spread throughout the carriage of the vehicle as they stirred, but Steve could only pick up a hushed ‘is that Sergeant Barnes?’ and ‘Jesus, what happened to him?’
“Thank you,” he said to each of the men as they climbed out. “Thank you so much. He needs medical attention.” He only received nods and ‘you’re welcome, captain’s before he clambered in with Bucky in his arms, still without a medic.
He lowered Bucky to the floor and sat him up against one of the benches, balancing him with a hand on his shoulder. He could see his eyes were wide open in what looked like terror. He was white as a sheet and clutching his head in his violently shaky hands. Teeth still clenched, he hissed in pain as he breathed, letting out a very small whimper with every exhale.
“Please,” he cried quietly. “Please, please, please, please…”
“Please what, Buck?” Steve asked, a rock in his stomach. “What do you need?”
“Please don’t, please don’t-” he moaned, eyes wide as dinner plates. “I promise I’ll- promise I’ll do it. Promise. Promise. Please. I’m sorry, I’ll- please don’t… anymore. Please.”
The rock in Steve’s stomach turned into a bowling ball. “Don’t what, Bucky?”
Bucky didn’t- couldn’t say anything. He wasn’t even looking at Steve, just staring past him at some unknown threat. He rocked back and forth and cried softly, occasionally seizing up in what Steve assumed was pain, begging for something he could not fulfill. Or rather something he couldn’t prevent. What had happened back in that factory?
“Stevie, Steve, buddy,”
“I’m right here, Buck.”
If Steve wasn’t faced with the immediate image of Bucky sitting in front of him, crying and looking smaller than he’d ever looked before, he knew he would have felt that heat behind his eyes. That intense, furious heat. The same heat he felt when Schmidt had laughed and turned his back to flee like a coward from the building he’d set to detonate with not only them but all his own people inside.
All he knew he could do was simply sit next to Bucky and hug him to his chest, making soothing sounds as his friend sobbed and sobbed into his scorched leather jacket. The way Bucky was clinging to him, he just felt so… deprived. Of everything. Food, water, rest, human contact. It felt like he hadn’t touched another human in years. How could they do this to him? How could anyone do this to a person and sleep at night?
This went on for at least half an hour before Bucky managed to calm down. Really, he didn’t calm down so much as grow exhausted by the ordeal, but his breathing leveled out and his eyes began to droop. He eventually took a deep breath and leaned away, hurriedly brushing the tears from his eyes like they were something shameful, something he didn’t think he had the right to expose to anyone. That was probably the worst part of it all.
“I’m okay.” he said hoarsely. “Sorry, I’m okay. I just need rest.”
“I’m not leaving, Buck.”
“No, it’s fine. I need to be by myself.”
Steve waited a moment before lowering his chin and gently asking “Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” Bucky nodded and sniffed, then tried his best to break the awkwardness with a smile. “Yeah, I’ll be fine. It’s okay.”
Steve nodded dubiously and slowly rose to his feet.
“Okay,” he said, “If anything happens, I’ll be near the truck. Just shout, okay?”
“Okay,” Bucky gave a forced chuckle and looked down at his shoulder. “Thank you. Don’t worry, I’m fine.”
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He couldn’t tell him.
Bucky bit his lip and rubbed his eyes, which still burned with tears, on his filthy sleeves. He wasn’t gonna lie. He wanted to. He wanted to so bad, but he just… couldn’t. The words wouldn’t roll off his tongue, his throat wouldn’t open. He literally, physically couldn’t tell Steve what he was thinking.
Maybe that was for the best. It’d be hard to understand what he was feeling. Hell, it was hard for him. He literally could not recall anything about what they – Hydra – asked him, interrogated him about, what they did to him, which struck him as really weird and possibly worrying. Really, he was kind of glad about it, because it was probably god-awful torture from what he could remember from the room. That room with the ever-present humming noise and dull green light and the brightest white lamp that made his eyes sting. With the… electricity. There was electricity.
Most people remember stuff like that because it’s the kind of thing that haunts you for the rest of your life. Why he was the exception, he didn’t know. But it made him nervous.
No. No, he probably just blocked it out. Plus, it was likely was that his brain just wasn’t working properly right now. When was the last time he slept? Or ate? He could barely remember an hour ago, much less yesterday. An hour ago. An hour ago. He was walking with Steve. Yeah. Steve, who had this big, shit-eating grin plastered across his face. Bucky couldn’t help but smile at that. Today was the first time Bucky had seen him that ecstatic since god knows when.
Jesus, Steve was another point altogether. He was probably the key element of all this that made Bucky feel like he’d eaten raw fish last night and it was all some sort of weird-ass fever dream.
Yeah, the punk had a lot of explaining to do.
The little punk.
Bucky took a deep breath, settling himself against the side of the bench, listening to the hum of the truck’s engine, feeling the vibration from the floor. He was only now realizing how much his bones ached. His muscles were so tense. It was a strange kind of pain, like he’d been put together wrong or something.
He took another breath to relax himself, but to his disappointment it didn’t help at all. He leaned his head back against the seat so he was staring up at the tarp ceiling, then raised a hand to his face and stared at it through heavy eyes. He was shaking. He hadn’t noticed that before.
He laid his hand back down on his lap and turned his head to the side so he was gazing out of the back of the carriage. He could hear Steve’s muffled voice through the walls, talking with other soldiers. His tone had lost much of that overflowing joy it had had before Bucky’s episode, but he was still happy. And his voice never grew faint, so Bucky knew he didn’t wander more than a few feet away from the side of the supply truck.
Bucky’s joints still ached, but he was feeling a little more relaxed. To his relief his eyes flickered shut as he smiled, lulled into sleep by the bumpy road and muffled conversation around him, and his best friend’s voice on the other side of the wall.
God, he’d missed him.