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Bucky’s on a mission.
At five days, he can't get his hands to stop shaking, even if he concentrates. He stands in Steve’s kitchen and watches their reflections in the lip of the steel sink: one a peach-colored blur, the other just a darker shadow of metal on metal. It took longer to get here than it would for anyone else, except Steve, and happened quicker than he expected. The first few days, he avoided his bed, the couch, wouldn't allow himself to even slump forward in the hard kitchen chairs. By now, though, he can lie in his bed, close his blurring eyes, and know that sleep still can't reach him.
The part of him that was sniper-asset-weapon panics (sharp eyes, steady hands, what else is he good for?), but the feeling festers in a remote corner of his brain. Mostly, it feels right. He's been chasing the feeling for five days, and it doesn't disappoint.
It didn't used to be lack of sleep that did it to him. Part of his therapy has been going over what files they've found on his time with HYDRA. So much was done without his knowledge or consent; breaking it down into the hard facts of drug withdrawal and electroshock therapy and surgical modification is supposed to disarm the shapeless, half-remembered horror of it all. He hasn't told anyone how it really makes him feel: like everything his body remembers as normal is forever after out of his reach.
He can't shock himself into forgetfulness. He can't get his hands on the drugs that made him quiet and calm and focused. He can't even open up his own arm and switch it on or off at will, rip out wires or solder the joints down to slag. There's no icy coffin waiting for him at the end of this mission where he can sleep dreamlessly. For better or worse, his mind is remembering the charred scrapbook pages of ninety years. His body, though, has a shorter attention span, and those are the memories it carries.
So Bucky’s on a mission to recreate what he can and get a little peace down in his bones.
He stumbles around the kitchen, stealth a lost cause. The drugs never used to affect his coordination this much. It's a little like when he'd first come out of cryo, though, when all his limbs seemed to be responding to a different brain than the one he had. His head is filled with that same familiar static. It's a low buzz that chases out thoughts, such that he finds himself standing in the kitchen with a glass about to slip out of his fingers. No idea how long he's been standing there.
He fills the glass from the tap and takes careful sips. His stomach cramps before the water hits bottom. The roll of nausea, the swoop of anxiety, and the clench of hunger leave him with an angry sea where his guts used to be. He hasn't been eating either, but that's not so new. His digestive system had a hard time adjusting to solid food after decades of feeding tubes and freezing. The pantry in the apartment has been overtaken by cases of nutritional shakes. He's supposed to drink something like ten of them a day, an obscene quantity that still just barely delivers the calories his metabolism needs. He mostly skips them.
“Bucky? You okay?” Bucky sucks in a startled breath, reaction time appalling, when Steve sets a hand lightly on his shoulder. Sink. Water. Right.
“Tired,” Bucky says, brain-to-mouth filter gone, another bit of normal for him. Steve's hand stays on his shoulder and causes a rush of fever heat to flood Bucky’s body. He wobbles on his feet, sways forward into the counter so it can steady him.
“When'd you sleep last?” Steve will have heard him moving about at all hours of the day, early on, keeping himself awake. Bucky hopes he's fooled by the last couple days, though, when Bucky has been able to lie listless in his bed, still as death and just nominally, marginally conscious. “Buck!”
Bucky snorts, jerks back into the bulk of Steve’s chest. “Wha?” Must have drifted off. Away.
“What are you doing, Buck?” Steve doesn't mean standing in the kitchen, glass pouring its contents back into the sink because he hand has gone slack again. His voice is low and urgent, like he's asking his scout for a report about enemy positions up ahead.
“Getting comfortable,” Bucky tells him. God, that's a giggle lurking in his vowels, stuttering in his t’s. It's baldfaced truth and not at all what he should be saying. Because he can't, can’t explain to Steve how nothing hurts quite as much as comfort, nothing soothes quite like pain. He can control this, inflict this on himself, and there's no greater reason for it. He's not punishing himself, not doing penance for any sins, borrowed or imagined or come by honestly.
Steve, who has always thought in terms of bigger pictures, the broad strokes of ethics and duty, wants Bucky to have a reason. If there's a reason, Steve can outwit it, maneuver around it, stubborn straight through it. (Bucky remembers all of this from very long ago, but it's not the sort of memory Steve will appreciate when Bucky shares it.) Steve lets Bucky walk out of the kitchen because he hasn't worked out a strategy yet for an enemy he only thinks is there.
***
Bucky is on a mission, but so is Steve. He should have remembered Steve’s propensity to find himself a team and call in reinforcements.
“What are the chances of you letting me come over there?” Sam asks from the doorway of the bathroom. Bucky's eyes open with difficulty, cemented shut by grit and exhaustion. He lifts his pruned up flesh hand from the cold bath water to scrub them clean. It helps less than he had hoped. His brain is so scrambled, he can't be sure, but he thinks he actually was asleep just then. Being awake and being asleep don't feel like different things any more, if so.
Sam's got a glass of something green in one hand. The other forearm is propped high on the door frame, like he's just planning to hang around regardless. There's a thin line of reddened skin along each cheekbone, like he's been out in the wind, like he's been flying. He raises his eyebrows, still waiting for a response from Bucky. “Yeah,” he says, not remembering what the question was.
Sam pushes away from the door frame. A foot kicks the door partially closed behind him. Bucky wonders how far outside it Steve is hovering. Sam kneels next to the tub and passes a slow but dispassionate look over Bucky from head to foot--checking for damage. Bucky suspects body modesty was something he lost long before HYDRA got him, and Sam shows no sign of being bothered by his nakedness.
“Brought you breakfast,” Sam says. He waggles the glass at Bucky. The contents tip about viscously. “Home cooking for our best guy.”
“That's not food.” Bucky feels confident about that fact.
“Probably not, no.” Sam smiles. “Got the recipe from Steve’s buddy, Stark. Think you can drink some?”
Bucky's breath rasps out between his parted lips. They feel cracked and raw when his tongue passes over them. It's been a while since he drank water. Everything in his head has been starved out, leaving him feeling obedient. He reaches for the glass with both hands, the fine tremors still constant. Water drains from between the plates in his metal arm.
He keeps the first sip down by will alone, dry heaves making him double forward and slosh the bath water. “Disgusting,” he mumbles. It feels thinner in his mouth than it looked in the glass, the taste faintly briny. He uses his tongue to spread traces of it around his mouth, over his lips. “Horrible,” he adds just before he takes a second sip.
“So. Think you can tell me why you're recreating the bad old days?” Sam reaches forward and smooths his fingers across the goosebumps prickling along Bucky’s forearm from the cold water.
Bucky tips his head back against the wall. “Familiar.” The whole exercise has taken the edge off his desperation, left him clearer headed even as it ground his wits down to sawdust and sand. He can see it as a bid for control, as a natural reaction, as a damn fool idea. He just can't seem to stop.
He feels Sam's hand wrap around his to keep the glass from dumping green sludge into the bath. His other hand touches on the knotted muscles of Bucky’s shoulder, the tender, swollen skin under his eyes, the sweat-stiff tangle of his hair. Bucky just wanted to settle. He just wanted to feel like his skin and joints and guts fit where they had for seventy years, even if that was wrong.
Bucky doesn't know if he's said any of that aloud.
Sam's hand raises the glass to touch cool against his lower lip. Bucky opens obediently and lets Sam pour another small mouthful. “You need to go off-duty and this is what that looks like for you.”
Bucky swallows and nods. It surprises him when Sam’s thumb brushes damp over his cheek. He doesn't know when he started crying, tears sneaking up as unexpectedly as his giddy laughter when talking to Steve. It feels natural, though, just a side effect of the squirmy knot of sickness that's unwinding in his stomach at Sam’s attention.
“We’re gonna make a deal.” Bucky opens his eyes at that. Sam is a hazy figure perched on the lip of the tub. Bucky reaches to scrub his eyes and would probably have knocked a tooth out, smacking himself in the face with the glass, if Sam wasn't there to stop him. Sam's touch against his closed eyelids is impossibly gentle. It's not familiar, but Bucky wouldn't mind if it got to be.
“A deal,” Sam repeats when Bucky opens his eyes. “You're gonna quit it with the sleep deprivation campaign. I don't care if you don't sleep, but you're not going to fight it either. I don't want to see you looking like a corpse somebody propped up at the kitchen table again.” Bucky doesn't even remember Sam coming by when Bucky had been sitting out there to avoid soft places. “And you're going to tell one of us when you need to take a break.”
“Doesn't sound like much of a deal,” Bucky manages to say. “What's in it for me?”
“You do that, and when you need to unwind, I'll find you an alternative to all this,” Sam says with a wave of his hand to indicate Bucky, half dead in a tub of ice water.
“What kind of alternative?” Bucky's too tired to be really curious. There’s nothing left in his head to catch that spark. He thinks he might be interested in the knowledge later, though, so he might as well ask.
“Off the top of my head? Sensory dep tanks. See if Stark’s any better at inventing supersoldier-grade earplugs than he is at inventing smoothie flavors. Therapy animals. Knitting. Modern life offers a whole host of mindless activities for you to try when you need to take your brain offline.”
Bucky shudders pleasantly at the images Sam’s words conjure. If he could just go away whenever he needed to-- “Get a blindfold to go with the earplugs. Wanna try those first.”
“You got it. I'm gonna get Steve in here to haul your ass out of there. Braining yourself in the shower is an embarrassing death even if you're not an infamous assassin.” Bucky tries to hand the glass back to Sam. “Uh-uh, no way. That's all yours, buddy. Drink up before--”
Bucky can hear where Sam considered threatening him with intravenous fluids before thinking better of it. Bucky longs for the simplicity of that, too. He holds on instead to the promise of earplugs and soft animals and whole stretches of time when he can just be a body at rest, with nothing in his head. “Before it spills and you end up marinating in it,” Sam finishes instead. Bucky drinks, ready to hold up his end of the bargain.
They have a mission.