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Bucky heaved over the side of the cot, barely able to prop himself up as he whimpered sickly moans and almost-sobs once he felt the familiar aching bile rise up his throat from his stomach that never ceased to twist and turn since his captivity.
Steve sat by his side patiently, gently holding Bucky’s trembling body as his best friend threw up in a metal bucket on the muddy ground. His delicate hands – that weren’t so much like bird bones anymore – stroked Bucky’s spine, drawing lines up and down the ridges as if Steve was rebuilding the broken canvas of Bucky Barnes back together like a twisted masterpiece of graphite and watercolor amongst the debris of blood-stained, torn parchment.
“I’ve got you,” Steve whispered gently as Bucky trembled feverishly under his touch. His skin was a pyretic warmth of blotchy crimson, stripped down to just his undershirt and trousers underneath the scratchy army blanket in a pathetic attempt to reduce his temperature. It had been hours since they’d returned to their base – the sun was bleeding over the uneven horizon like broken paint-spill – and Bucky’s fever hadn’t broken. “You’re okay.”
Piecing together the fragments of whatever HYDRA had done to the other man had been a difficult task even without Bucky’s incoherent ramblings. Steve had talked to the others, but they’d almost always never seen their Sergeant, kept in isolation separate from the commanding officers. Tales and stories alike also spread like wildfire throughout their camp – things about specialised torture, turning allied men into weapons, human experimentation – but no one else besides Bucky had been recovered from the isolation divisions, Bucky had been their only survivor and, currently, he was too incapacitated beyond a few fever-induced delirious strings of half-sentences and mix-matched idioms.
(“Buck, you look like you’re gonna fall over any minute. Can I please just take you to medical?”
“You’re off your… fiddle, ‘m fine – right as a rocker, Idiot.”)
Whatever the story was, rebuilding it was like trying to match puzzle pieces made of broken glass shards together, only for them to collapse under his forcibility. It didn’t matter so much – or at least he hadn’t been so aware that something was so very wrongwrongwrong – as soon as he’d rescue the battalion, but the adrenaline high was fading fast – gone completely in a matter of hours – and left him feeling frozen and empty.
Bucky was looking less and less like the grey lead lines stretched against parchment hidden away in his notebook, or the kaleidoscope of bright eyes and warm hands against pale flesh from Steve’s memories of home where battlefield fireflies morphed into Brooklyn city lights, and rain become ruined charcoal blurring down the monochrome canvas.
Steve could draw Bucky endlessly like a twisted phenomenon that defied beyond muscle memory for the rest of infinity, for as long as he had hands to sketch ink and lead on paper – though this Bucky wasn’t one he’d known, and not one Steve would seem to be able to illustrate onto a canvas or parchment despite having all the watercolour-penciled hues that existed within the rainbow of colour to draw him with.
Instead, Bucky was looked sick – consumed by foreign, unrecognizable blankness underneath the fever heat and, God, did that terrify him. Warmth leaks from his shivering flesh in painful waves, eyes contorted by a dizzy haze of sickly intoxication, and suddenly Bucky was undeniably, terrifyingly small . Small in the way Steve had been from what he’d classified as before it all – from when he’d had bird-bone charcoal-stained hands, delicate breakable skin with watercolours of blackened blue bruise creating inevitably constant indentations, and a very mortal, very human ephemerality.
“What happened – why do you look…?” Bucky muttered out when he rolled lazily back onto his side, voice raw and scratchy for reasons Steve didn’t want to think about, already forever haunted by the way his body had seized and collapsed into catatonia when he did eventually find his friend. The erupting black, yellow, and cyanic bruises across the inside of Bucky’s elbow, the many needle marks of dried blood, the way Arnim Zola had looked at Bucky with solidifying possession was already enough for Steve to see red, like – if he were to become someone other than who he was – he could smash their skulls in, splatter their bone marrow against the walls, and completely relish in the intoxicating embers of burning their torturous compounds, turning them to ash all by the fault of his once artistic turned arsenic blood-soaked, gasoline-drenched hands.
His oath to never kill anyone be damned.
But –
If he thought those thoughts, Steve wasn’t sure how much of himself would really be staring back at Bucky. His eyes were the same ones Steve had drawn like infinite mantras of pure gospel during the endless night where sleep never came, and he wouldn’t betray what little recognition Bucky attained by eroding himself into something he couldn’t come back from. He didn’t want to hold Bucky’s shaking hands, or graze his friend’s blackened knuckles with his bleeding lips, while his other hand lay beside him, tainted in something distinctly human that smelled of pungent iron and sin – poisonous.
Steve forced his mind to stay vacant, stay present and grounded – tried to remember what Bucky had asked, what gravity felt like as he existed unanchored.
“Government experiment. Super Soldier Project, remember?” He replied and watched as Bucky’s glassy eyes never stilled, and instead danced around Steve’s features like this had been the first time he’d seen him, and couldn’t grasp the complexity of this imposter’s facade, imitating the boy he’d loved.
They then glazed off past Steve’s face in the distance, into nothingness.
He gently called Bucky’s name, desperately trying to get his friend back from wherever he seemed to go to feel safer, feel like someone else – because Steve was a selfish son of a bitch and the absence of someone – someone who could never could stay still long enough without laughing to model a drawing of, or who liked braiding his sisters’ hair with silk ribbon and butterfly pins, or who got cold when they were sad and needed to be cocooned of in a fort of blankets – unrecognizably becoming something they were not, scared him more than anything else.
But Bucky’s gaze and mind appeared to return a few seconds later, and suddenly it was like he’d never lost himself at all, leaving Steve dizzy with relief that he hadn’t lost Bucky completely in all the ways that mattered, or at least until the next episode took hold of him, and made the world go dangerously colourless again.
The absences happened multiple times every few minutes, each time making nauseating panic clenched itself around his heart like he’d forgotten how to breathe. He wasn’t sure what to do other than to wait for Bucky to come back to himself, answer his questions five times over with patient quietness, rub his back when his body curled in on itself, and run his fingers gently through Bucky’s hair, as if that were the cure-all to everything that was so very wrong – or as if it made up for the things Steve couldn’t heal or fix or save because he hadn’t been there – instead of dancing like a monkey on a stage, while Bucky rotted away into smithereens between Steve’s hands that hadn’t even realized what they’d been losing until it had been too late – lost.
Apologies had left his mouth until his lips were blue and his throat was closing up, but Bucky hadn’t been enough of himself to recognize the words, the voice, the touch that begged for forgiveness, and that had only made the plea for retribution somehow all the more chaotically, heartbreakingly desperate.
Now Steve only sighed, shaky breath leaving his mouth in some extreme effort to conceal how desperately he wanted to cry or scream, and Bucky mirrored the exhale as his mind rebuilt itself until it inevitably fell apart again. He even smiled – a small, weak little curl of the edges of his sticky lip – like he was completely unaware of how Steve counted each breath Bucky breathed just in case he stopped.
Steve took the moment of lucidity to gently lie Bucky further back down onto the cot and clean his face from the sweat and bile. Steve took a cloth from the nurses’ equipment, brushing the stray hair that had fallen across Bucky’s eyes out of his face and putting his friend back together as if it were as easy as connecting lines on paper to paint the art whole. Bucky hummed lightly from his oblivious haze at the cool touch, and it was as if Steve’s flesh on his was something sacred, something he was basking in like sunlight that seeped in through tattered curtains, making the whole apartment illuminate with stardust.
“Remember when you used to do this for me?” He said with a bittersweet smile because the memories were hazy the way Bucky’s eyes were, though he could feel the touch of the other man’s hand caressing his own too-warm forehead from those many yesterdays like it was the only fragment of his mind that existed in this moment. Bucky would press his cool lips to the aching flesh of Steve’s check, his head, his lips – “checking for fever,” Buck would say and Steve would let me – and somehow their affections would fight off the cold.
The many clusters of fragmented memories formed nebulae-like constellations within his mind, and suddenly the air smelled of sleep and of rosewood and of midnight rain and of stolen cough syrup – because that was them, completely and infinitely, indefinitely, and those were the yesterdays Steve would trade his tomorrows for.
“Mm…” Bucky mumbled, the only sign he’d heard the question, though Steve had a suspicion that Bucky couldn’t remember what he’d asked, if his noncommitted tone and loopy eyes that couldn’t stay open were anything to go by.
Bucky leaned into Steve’s touch as he stroked his fingers over the rest of Bucky’s hair. It had grown slightly longer since Steve had seen him last, and was now just long enough that those once bird bone, watercolour-stained fingers were able to run through it. Steve was careful to avoid the little tangles and knots so as to not hurt him further, and Bucky seemed to melt into his mercy, surrendering.
“Mm, feels like cloud heaven.” He said with slitted eyes and a voice that melted into the cool dawn with radiating fever, but it was everything to hear him speak, even if the words were imperfect, disillusioned with sickness and delirium. It was all so wrong, but they were bathing in the atmosphere of that sweet, airy feeling of renounced lucidity after sanity had been ripped away after a moment of terrifying absence, and Steve was too tired to worry about the next time Bucky wasn’t Bucky – at least right now. He just wanted to hear his voice, feel his skin against his own and that was enough.
“I think you mean cloud nine or seventh heaven.” Steve chuckled lightly, bringing the wet washcloth to his rosy cheek where the fever had painted it shades of crimson, and, despite the delirium smothering Bucky’s mind like fog and the unknown illness leaky from him in waves, Steve thought he looked beautiful. He always had. His hair framed the pathetic little pillow like a halo, rosy watercolour bloomed high upon his glistening lips, and somehow, bright, oceanic eyes were radiating in spite of the glassy fog that threatened to suffocate his lucidity through the fever. In some demonic, evil juxtaposition, Bucky Barnes looked beautiful in what may as well have been his deathbed, and Steve wasn’t so sure what to do with that sudden epiphany.
“Why would I add numbers?” Bucky questioned, eyebrows furrowing and giving Steve this pout that conveyed more than he’d ever have to say. He was blaming Steve for the way the English language and it’s idioms worked with a single look , and that was enough for Steve to feel air circulate within his lungs again.
Steve smiled – something small and real with the corners of his mouth, also weakly attempting to imitate Bucky’s sour face. “Don’t look at me like that, I didn’t invent those sayings.”
“I’m looking at you like that ‘cause you’re a dumbass,” Bucky replied flatly, then regaining true annoyance (although it was definitely more of a whine – not that Bucky would ever admit to such behavior). “ And you stop doing that thing with the rag!”
“Sorry, sorry.” Steve hadn’t realised he’d let the washcloth slip from Bucky’s head, and promptly readjusted said mistake so he was now gently caressing it over his warm skin. “Is this better?”
Bucky sighed at the soothing coolness, melting into its facade of tranquility that one often found impossible to find amongst a war zone. He shifted, pressing his face into the mattress and moaning softly as nausea or perhaps the void, absent feeling returned to assault his body, making his mind amplify with a throbbing ache behind his eye sockets and his empty stomach threaten to destroy itself.
Bucky curled in on himself, seemingly trying to become as small as possible, visibly paling as he spoke around the urge to throw up. “No,” he said quietly, breaths uneven and arms wrapping around his middle from underneath the blanket. “Still feel beyond the weather. I really am turning into you.”
“I’m so sorry, Buck.”
Bucky smiled despite the hurt, and Steve wasn’t any closer to feeling any less guilty about it. “Shut up, punk,” he mumbled. “As soon as my insides are done turning themselves inside out, I ain’t gonna be your damsel in distress for another minute.”
“You’ve saved me, what? Only all my life?” Steve said, thinking of back alleys and bloody noses, of the inability to breathe and Bucky’s warm skin. “I think you can give me just this once for helping out your stubborn ass.”
“Oh, I’m the stubborn one? Have you met yourself? I feel like I’m talking to a brick wall half the time,” he scoffed. “And fine. We can be even now. That daring rescue from the clutches of HYDRA sons of bitches was quite the show compared to back-alley lowlifes.”
“Same shit, different bullies.”
“Shut up. Will you let me thank you, punk?”
“I already know that, Buck.”
The washcloth had slipped from Bucky's forehead again, this time onto the mattress, though neither of them seemed to notice. Steve had replaced it with his own hand, lightly stroking Bucky’s cheek with the backs of delicate fingers and coming to rest them in front of his soft lips where Bucky murmured kisses against his knuckles. Steve moved his head in close, resting his chin on the mattress and they breathed the same oxygen.
Bucky’s eyes blinked slowly, expression morphing into a solemn tiredness, but Steve didn’t think it was all the fault of the fever which had kept them both up all night until twilight dawn. It was something more. “Missed you.”
”I missed you, too.” Steve replied because oh, God, he had. Even now, pressed close enough to Bucky that they were exchanging breaths, could hear one another’s heartbeats, count the freckles on each other’s noises – Steve had a feeling that he would never be close enough.
“Back at HYDRA, I used to fall asleep every night imagining you with me,” Bucky said, and Steve tried not to picture him alone on the floor of a rotting cell whispering Steve’s name into the darkness, feel his phantom fingers ghost across Bucky’s battered and bruised flesh like an intangible memory of someone slowly losing themselves to a sweeter fantasy – but he did, and felt like weeping. “I would think about before the war and how –“
Bucky cut himself off, for the first time looking a little sheepish – as best he could with half his face buried against the pillow and his mouth muffled by Steve’s hand. He appeared to be about to say something he shouldn’t for some arcane, special reason, and that only served to fuel Steve’s curiosity.
“What, Buck?” Steve’s pressed softly, leaning his face in close so that their noses were almost touching.
“I should’a got you that ring,” Bucky mumbled against the warm flesh of Steve’s hand pressed to his lips. His eyes were half-closed in a distant sort of haze, the dreamworld of escaping to a sweeter memory, but he sounded lucid enough for the moment to be genuine, enough of himself to feel like Steve’s home. “I saw it in the window of a shop before I left. Was gonna ask you…”
Bucky didn’t finish the words, not really – but that was okay. Steve was okay with filling in the gaps, building the broken glass pieces back together into something perfectly fragmented and whole, and drawing the graphite and watercolour lines into something beautiful.
Bucky didn’t finish the words, not really – but that was perfect, in its own little way.
“Are you proposing to me, Casanova?” Steve whispered and he was smiling. His head was leaned in close to where Bucky’s lay, hair spread all around the pillow like that damned halo, and his glassy eyes glistened in the dawn’s morning glow like they were made of celestial stardust with a heart of pure gold.
Bucky blinked hazily, gently kissing the knuckles of Steve’s hand where it was pressed to his lips, one soft caress for each finger, hidden by the warmth of their almost-touching foreheads and the silence of breaking dawn.
“Yeah. I think so.” Bucky told him, and that sounded right in Steve’s mind from where Bucky had whispered the simple, soft words against the back of his hand. “You’re my best guy after all.”
“I didn’t think you were the marrying type,” Steve murmured with a soft chuckle despite himself, distantly aware of the smell of rain and art and sleep on Sunday mornings colliding with his sense of reality where everything smelled of mud and gunpowder.
“I didn’t think so either until you.”
It was a jarring contradiction that a moment like this – two souls trying to fit themselves back together like broken smithereens of ash, find their ways back home amongst this battlefield of blood and tainted identity, surrounded by something so very ugly – could be so familiarly grounding, but perhaps the indentations were what made it perfect, the mistakes making it something beautiful.
Steve knew realistically that neither of them would ever have the privilege to be the ‘marrying type’, but he was glad they found this. He was glad they got to keep coming back to each other, no matter where they had been. They existed in this universe like a tethered red ribbon bound to one another while floating through the storm that was outer space, and throughout they were unanchored to gravity and reality, they were bound to each other – and Steve decided that was perfect, too.
Steve gently uncurled himself from Bucky’s gasp, reaching down inside his own shirt where a chain hung from around his neck and pulled the cool metal over his head. Steve watched as Bucky’s bright, half-slitted eyes opened fully, understanding.
“Yes,” He told Bucky, feeling elation grow inside his chest as if he were falling in the most perfect, solidifying of ways, as he pressed his dog tags into the warm palm of Bucky’s hand where it rested beside his head.
“Steve,” Bucky said back and it sounded like it was suddenly the only word in the world, perhaps a prayer that ached to leave his mouth since the overwhelming sensation of rapture had overcome his body like the feeling of falling in love. He reached for his own dog tag from inside the blanket, slowly and with a slight ache in his limbs, but Steve accepted the gift as Bucky had accepted his.
The daybreak had now completely arisen over the forest trees, bleeding sunlight throughout the camp and illuminating the silver metal in each of their hands, shining in the same way diamonds would. The Reveille wake up call erupted with a sound of trumpets and drums from the center of camp, bringing forth a collection of groans from the other soldiers, awaiting their first orders of the day.
Inside medical, Steve and Bucky shifted apart. The mud squelched underneath Steve’s boots, the smell of bile hung sickly within the air, Bucky’s temperature wasn’t any lower than it had been since the beginning, and they were an hour away from being sent out again to fight Nazis. It was a shithole place to get engaged, Steve realized for the first time and he thinks Bucky did too – but the brokenness of everything didn’t seem to matter all that much.
They’d been broken before, and they would break again like it was somehow foretold, written into their destinies the way the stars constellated the sky, but it was okay. It was perfect, and Steve was alright with that. They’d rebuild themselves together.
Steve and Bucky were good at that.