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Cryo was pain, not cold. From alive to dark to alive again one silver flash and stab of pain, every single nerve screaming while it shut down. No temperature no sensation just pain and then the ache of coming back like the aftermath of a beating over every inch of skin, every particle of bone. That's all. One more pain among all the others, the fucking knife to shape days. That's all.
Cold is different.
He was always cold.
They wore wool and cotton, polyester, leather, gore-tex, everything - uniforms, normal clothes, lab-coats fucking layers even indoors one over the other over the other the only skin that touched the air on their faces and their hands. By their choice he wore nothing or next to, nothing between him and the air, nothing between him and them.
So they could see him. See what his body did. How well it functioned. If it needed repair.
Attention.
Correction.
Concrete walls. Tile floors. Underground. Always, always always cold. And above what he wore functioned as anchors for weapons and bare protection from abrasion, damage: no vent for heat, no shield from cold. (Why bother? He functioned perfectly without.) The memory of too-hot weaves through like a trickle of blood in a river, nausea through vertigo, brief and bright and gone, diluted by so many more memories of cold.
Memory after memory of cold.
He hates every single fucking one of them. And here he sits, in the living-room, on the floor, and it's -
- cold.
Because. Because -
Because.
Because he's a fucking idiot. Because if he was someone else, something else you'd say there's something wrong with him but there isn't something wrong with him there's so much wrong with him not all of it even has fucking names and all of it means he is out here in the middle of the fucking night by himself in the dark being cold again and Steve won't fucking shoot him and he can't shoot himself. Can't cut his own throat.
And he doesn't know what either of them thinks they're fucking doing.
And he hates . . . everything, he hates everything he can think of, and everything about this body he's stuck in, the one that feels cold but won't fold to it, the one that breaks things he didn't used to be able to move, the one that's sick and changed and grafted over metal he doesn't want and thick with who fucking knew what in every cell. The one with a brain carved all over and burned clean over and over again that's probably still the only thing in the whole sack of meat that's really his. Maybe his.
Nothing's really his.
And he can't sleep and he wants to sleep, would trade his fucking soul for sleep if he thought he still had one, and most of the time he doesn't. Maybe. Maybe that's not true. Right now he can't tell.
God, you bastard, he just wants to sleep.
And when he hears Steve get up he digs his left knuckle into his temple, metal even colder than he is, and he knows if he pushes hard enough tissue will pulp and bone will shatter and drive into his brain and he probably still won't manage to fucking die of it. Because he can't. He has drowned and burned and bled and frozen and he can't fucking die so it just sits there and leaves tracks all over him everywhere and he doesn't want it.
Doesn't want it. Doesn't want anything.
A drawer opens in the bedroom, closes again; fabric hisses against fabric, enough of it to paint the shape of blanket or sheet or something like them. When Steve comes out of the hall with two blankets over his shoulder and something else in his arm Bucky sighs and rubs his forehead.
"You should go back to bed," he says, and the street-light illuminates more than enough to see the look Steve gives him.
"If you think I'm leaving you out here to sit in the dark alone," he says, draping one blanket over the arm of the couch, "you're - " and then it feels like Steve stops and rethinks his words and finishes with, "wrong."
Bucky jerks his head at the glow from the window. "It's not that dark," he says. He's trying for bland amusement. He's pretty sure he fails.
"Close enough," Steve replies, and adds, "Here," and hands Bucky the other thing in his arms. It's a sweatshirt, one of the new ones, not enough washes to turn the soft inside into tangled pills yet. Bucky takes it, a little mechanically, and then the other blanket when Steve gives him that.
"Besides," Steve adds, "it's cold out here."
Bucky stares at the shirt for a minute, until something gives and he can make himself pull it on over his head. "Not really," he says, anyway.
"Cold enough," Steve says, half an echo of what he said before, and sits on the couch. He turns the lamp on; Bucky can hear him pick up the sketch-pad and the pencil, can hear the scratch of graphite on wood-pulp paper. And the shirt is something and the blanket is something and still Christ part of Bucky wants, wants so much to push himself up and curl into warmth, because Steve is always warm.
And, Christ Steve, if I was a dog you'd put us both out of my misery. And if he could dig into his brain and make everything shut up -
He leans his forehead on folded arms and tries to shut some of it out and feels like a kid blocking out a bomb-strike with his hands over his ears. It doesn't work. Of course it doesn't work.
It can't work. Every single part of it's just him, every fucking crazy particle screaming at him. You can't get away from yourself. You can't escape.
When Steve touches his upper right arm it startles him and he flinches - tries to jerk the startle back in and says, "Sorry," because he knows it won't work either. That he's already jerked away, because he didn't see it coming and his body knows what it knows and doesn't give a fuck what he thinks about anything.
Steve's put the sketch-pad down again, back beside the lamp. He tilts his head.
"C'mere?" he says, quietly. And the question-mark curls around it like a fucking safety rope, like he's working that hard to keep it a suggestion, a question and nothing else, and for a second it still drags on Bucky's brain like pulling on barbs hooked into flesh.
The couch isn't really wide enough for both of them, and sometimes leather sticks to skin, and he doesn't have to. And he stares at his hands, tries to decide if either of them're really his anyway, and says, "What are you doing, Steve?"
"Said I'm not leaving you out here alone in the dark," Steve replies and Bucky almost shakes his head and stays where he is. Almost.
Maybe he doesn't because if you know enough, you can hear where Steve's afraid. And he knows enough.
He lets Steve give him a hand up and pull him over, lets Steve settle them both so that maybe with an act of God neither of them'll have numb arms or legs in twenty minutes and Steve won't have bruises from Bucky's left arm shoved against him. Steve covers them both with both blankets, settles them around Bucky's shoulders.
Bucky can't unwind. He can't make the muscles that twisted themselves up let go and that can't be comfortable to have lying against you. But if he says anything Steve won't even lie, because the stupid self-sacrificing idiot'll convince himself it's true, and Steve's skin smells like sleep, and Bucky can hear his pulse and heart-beat, feel his ribs move when he breathes. And Steve's warm.
Steve's always warm.
And it hurts but he doesn't want to move. Doesn't want to go, be anywhere else. Maybe, right now, not even nowhere. Not even sleep.
After a minute he says, "You left the light on."
"Nn," Steve acknowledges, sleepily. "S'over there. Get it later." And he'd have to move to turn it off, and Bucky doesn't want him to do that, anyway.
It's already two a.m. Morning's not that far away. And he doesn't have to move till then. He can just stay.
Just stay.