Chapter Text
Everything’s dark, and everything hurts.
Steve’s eyes fly open, expecting a Chair with restraints and a mask locked around his face. Instead he finds himself lying on something soft, and there’s a gentle touch on his wrist.
“On your left.”
Steve turns his head, wincing at the discomfort, only to find himself looking into the concerned eyes of one Sam Wilson.
He has a hundred questions, but Sam gives his wrist a squeeze and says, “I get it. It’s a lot. We don’t have to get to all of it now.”
Steve nods, settling back into the pillows. His throat is sore. He doesn’t remember why.
“There’s no pressure, Steve. We can go as slow as you need.” After Steve nods again, Sam asks, “What’s the last thing you remember?”
Pain. Cold. Orders barked in his ear telling him to hurt, to kill—
“Tony.”
There are flashes. His hands around Tony’s throat. Looking into Tony’s eyes as he begged Steve to stop. Steve curled in Tony’s chest while a gentle hand massaged his back.
“Tony’s fine," Sam assures him. "He came out of that fight better than you did, actually.”
“Okay.” Steve looks around the medical bay, at the starchy white, the doctors and nurses giving them space. Even so, he notes sweaters under lab coats, the dusting of snow on the grass, the dead trees outside the window—trees with leaves that had only just started to turn orange the last time he saw them. “How long?”
“Steve—"
“How long, Sam?”
“Four months, two weeks, three days and…” Sam checks his watch. “Two hours.”
Steve closes his eyes as he sinks back into the pillows. Four months. Four months in HYDRA’s custody as they did who knows what to him…
Sam predicts his next question. “You’re going to be fine, Steve. HYDRA didn’t do anything to you physically that won’t heal in time.”
“And what about…” Steve taps his forehead.
“We don’t know,” Sam admits. “The doctors are still running tests. But whatever they did to you, Steve, you broke through it. That’s a good sign.”
“Okay.” More is coming back to him now. Sam’s phone call waking him. Finding Bucky gone. The HYDRA base—
“Bucky.” Suddenly Steve is wide awake. “Sam, he’s…”
“Gone.”
Steve closes his eyes, remembering an unmoving figure in a snowbank. His fault. He doesn’t remember the reason why it was his fault. He just knows.
“But he’s not with HYDRA, as far we know. We’re not sure if he’s going to come back, but we found him once. We can find him again.”
“I…” Steve forces his eyes open. “What?”
“You don’t remember?” When Steve shakes his head, Sam continues. “He came back. Took out Riegal, then he vanished. Nat’s on it. She sends her best, by the way. She wanted to come and see you, but she figured you’d rather her be out there, looking for Barnes.”
“He’s not…he’s alive?”
Sam gives Steve’s wrist another squeeze. “Yeah. He’s alive.”
A weight evaporates from Steve's chest. Alive. Gone, but alive.
Sam's grip tightens on his wrist. “Why do I get the sense you did something stupid and heroic that got him out?”
“I don’t…I don’t remember.”
“That’s alright. But no more jumping on grenades for you, okay?”
Steve’s brow furrowed. “I jumped on a grenade?”
"That's one way of putting it." Sam's voice turns grim. “Do you remember what happened on that HYDRA raft?"
Steve looks down at the two scars lining Sam’s wrists, one up each side; the signs of two nasty breaks. HYDRA had made Bucky do that. Because of him. “I remember.”
“Okay." A dark shadow passes over Sam's face. "If you get a choice like that again—choose you, okay?”
But Steve shakes his head. “They would have killed you. Me…” He gestures down at himself. “Still here.”
“That’s not the point.” Sam lets go of Steve’s wrist to clench his hands together. “Apart from you being my friend and not wanting…that to happen to you, the world needs Captain America, alright? So keep him in the world next time.”
The words don’t make sense through the fog that’s beginning to fill his brain. “Just a title…” Steve grasps in the air until Sam takes his hand. “Someone gotta fill it, maybe. Don’t need to be me.”
“You know any other super-soldiers except your old army buddy? Because I don’t think he’s ready for that quite yet.”
“Don’t need to be a super-soldier." A strange tiredness is filling him, the kind he hasn’t felt since before the serum. “Don’t need to be a soldier at all. Just a good man. Understand?” He uses his free hand to point at Sam, even as eyelids grow heavy.
“Okay, I think that’s the sign that someone needs to go back to sleep. You heal faster than the rest of us, but you still have to heal.”
Steve barely hears him as his eyes shut and he lets the blissful sleep take him away again.
They all come and see him over the next week. Natasha video calls him, and although she never tells him where she is, he’s just grateful for any updates on Bucky she can provide. Clint shows him a hundred pictures of baby Nate, Rhodey delivers war stories, and Wanda drops by with Vision in tow. Steve doesn’t comment on the fact that they hold hands when they think he’s not looking.
So when he opens his eyes after a sleep that is becoming less and less filled with nightmares of masks and restraints and ice, it's one of them he is expecting, and not Tony Stark, to be sitting in the visitor’s chair. “Tony?”
Tony almost drops the coffee he’s clutching. “Jesus, Cap, give a guy some warning.”
Steve feels a smile tug at his lips. “Sorry.”
“No, you’re not. Damnit, they said you probably weren’t going to wake up yet.”
Steve tries to mask the disappointment that this apparently isn’t a visitor’s call. “Then why are you here?”
“Someone’s always here.”
“Oh. Why?”
“Why?” Tony lays aside the coffee and tablet he's holding. “Because we lost you for four months, that’s why. You really think we were going to let you out of our sight again?”
Warmth replaces the disappointment, only to be replaced by a sheer cold that makes him feel like he’s back in the cryo chamber. He forces himself to turn his head so he can take his teammate in properly.
There are still bruises around his neck.
Tony must catch what Steve has locked onto, because he hastily tugs the collar of his shirt higher. It doesn’t hide them. “No, nah, and nope. We’re not doing that.”
“Tony—”
“I said, no. It wasn’t your fault. In fact, it was quite the opposite of your fault.”
“I hurt you. I tried to kill you.”
“That HYDRA bitch made you. That was all her. You know what wasn’t her? You stopping.”
Steve squeezes his eyes tight shut. He’s been remembering more and more every time he wakes, but only now is he recalling how he wrapped his hand around Tony’s throat because— “You got rid of your armor. Why would you do that?”
“Because that hag was going make you pull a kamikaze if I started winning. I figured, you know, you’re you. And there is no way you would ever hurt m—” He breaks off, quickly rerouting. “There’s no way you would ever hurt anyone on this team. That was where I placed my bet. And guess what? I won.”
He’d been so close. He would have done it, he’d been about to do it—
“Steve. Look at me.”
Steve forces his eyes open, running his eyes over Tony’s injuries.
Tony snaps his fingers, making him look away. “Hey. Stop that. This is why I wanted to wait a few more days. They’re almost healed, see? Better than you. So no guilting yourself, alright? That’s a no on any guilt.”
Steve sees he’s not going to win that fight, so he nods his head, too tired to do anything else.
“Do you want to go back to sleep?
He shakes his head.
“Liar. You’re on the mend, by the way. Just taking longer than normal.”
“What…” He swallows hard, not sure if he really wants to know the answer to this question. “What did they do to me?”
“Nothing that can’t be undone. Actually…” Tony sighs. “Most of the damage was…me. Sorry. Apparently even super-soldiers take time to come back from their body being flooded with a fatal amount of electricity.”
Steve looks over at him. “No…no guilting.”
It takes Tony a second to catch his meaning. “That’s not the same thing!”
“Is too.”
“You were brainwashed!”
“And you were saving my life.” Tony goes to argue further, but Steve cuts him off. “We’re both alive, and here. Call it a win?”
“Yeah.” Tony gives him a smile—the genuine one he saves for only a handful of people. “I’d call this a win.”
It’s the middle of the night when he has his final visitor.
He’s not healed enough to leave the med bay just yet, but is well enough that his teammates have finally relented on their round-the-clock vigilance after Steve had insisted he needed some privacy.
He knows who it is the moment he wakes up; the familiar presence he’d know anywhere. He doesn’t know if Natasha had found him and brought him here, or if he’d made his way back of his own accord and broken in. That’s a question for another time—the only important thing now is that Bucky is here.
“Jerk,” Steve says softly.
There’s a long pause, so long Steve is sure he’s not going to get an answer. That’s okay. There are still holes in his mind too. They can work on filling them in together.
Then— “Punk.”
The shape in the corner ripples across the room, sitting tentatively in the visitor’s chair. Steve reaches blindly for his hand, and Bucky lets him take it. “You’re here.”
“I left you.”
“You came back.” He gives Bucky’s hand a squeeze. “We’re safe now.”
“You’re safe?”
“Yeah, Buck. Mission complete, okay?”
The impossible tension in Bucky’s shoulders deflates. “You’re Steve.”
“Yes.”
“I’m…I’m Bucky.”
Steve feels a lump gather in his throat. “Yeah. Yeah pal, you’re Bucky.”
The shape in the visitor’s chair shifts. “I’m not sure what that means.”
“That’s okay,” Steve says quickly. “We can figure that out together.”
He’s greeted with silence, until Bucky reaches into a pocket and brings out a book, dumping it in Steve’s lap.
Steve reaches out, tentative. “I can look?"
Bucky nods, once.
He opens it. It’s Bucky’s handwriting, scrawled over every inch of page. Fragments of memories, sketches, phrases and numbers and questions.
“Is this…” Bucky clears his throat, his voice small. He points at the book. “Is this Bucky?”
Steve takes a deep breath. He doesn’t expect to fix all of this in one night, but he can make a start. “Bits and pieces. But this.” He reaches out so he can place a hand on Bucky’s knee. “This, you, are Bucky Barnes, alright? And it’s okay to feel you don’t know who that is right now. That might take a while. But we can do it together if…if you stay here with me.”
Bucky tenses again, and Steve is half-sure he’s going to run out of the room.
“You don’t have to,” Steve assures him. “You can leave whenever you like. But I’d like you to stay. With me. If you want.”
Bucky ducks his head, but Steve still catches the words. “Here is safe.”
“The safest place I know.”
“I want…” He stumbles over that last word, and then affirms it. “I want…safe.”
“Okay.” Steve looks at the ceiling again. “Well, right now I’m very tired. Mind keeping me safe while I sleep?”
Bucky relaxes again as he’s given the familiar mission. There’s going to be a lot to explain in the morning. Work to do. Obstacles to climb.
But that’s in the morning. Right now, Steve is safe, with his team, and with Bucky by his side.
He’s home.