Chapter Text
The body’s convulsing, muscles cramping, twitching like a dying fish on land trying to get its last breath of air. The pain burns through him like wildfire.
“Семнадцать.”
Inside the vessel, someone deep inside the soldier screams into the emptiness that is his body.
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He carries Steve over his shoulder. The rain pitter-patters on the sidewalk, on the roofs of the cars parked alongside it, in the puddles forming where the cobblestones are unbalanced. He’s skinny like a leaf, but their clothes are drenched and heavy. Bucky’s father’s old cotton suit, too large for his 17-year-old body, hangs heavy off his shoulders. Steve’s chest rattles like the piggybank left untouched for years on his bedroom shelf, his eyelids closed, just trying to survive.
Shit, thinks Bucky. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, he thinks as he hauls him up the stairs to his home. Shit, as he carries him across the threshold as if he were his bride. Shit, as he lays him down on his bed. And goddamn it, Sarah Rogers is lying in her own next door, coughing up blood.
“How’s your ma holdin’ up?” he’d asked Steve earlier that day, and Steve had smiled that heart-breaking smile of his, that smile that Bucky would give up his whole life just to guarantee and said: “Been worse.”
Isn’t he a beautiful boy? Sarah had asked Bucky once. Beautiful as a lady, Bucky’d replied. And he is. He is. With those big sad eyes rimmed with his long dark lashes, that pink mouth, those dark brows and that big nose of his. Even now, when his hair’s wet and all over the place, when the colour’s gone from his cheeks. Even now he’s still the most beautiful thing Bucky knows. His heart twists in the most painful way, twitching, like a muscle spasm, just by looking at him. He collapses, exhausted, on his knees.
“Please,” he whispers to no one. “Please.”
Steve twitches in his bed, cold as a dead man, pale as one too, with sweat pearling on his forehead.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Stevie.” He cries into his shoulder, the sound muffled by Steve’s heart-shattering coughs.
I’m sorry, he thinks, this time knowing exactly who he is talking to. I’m sorry. I’ve tried my damnedest, but I’ll try some more. I’ll try. I’ll try. I’ll try, he prays, knowing that’s all he’ll ever be able to do.
The soldier screams, angry, furious, livid. Inside, Bucky Barnes screams too.