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Steve had never seen Bucky hospitalized before. Not once. There was never anything that happened to him in childhood that couldn't be fixed by the efforts of one or both of their mothers. There was no bone that they couldn't set right, no fever that they couldn't get to break. Steve had seen Bucky sick as a dog, sure, but only in the setting of his parents' home. He'd seen Bucky's face swollen beyond recognition after a boxing match, but it was nothing that a few days on the couch couldn't make right. Bucky had never gotten so wounded with the Howling Commandos that they couldn't patch him up in the field, not even when the building he was sniping from took a direct hit from a shell. Hell, he was more often seen dressing everyone else's wounds than needing aid to stop his own bleeding.
Thinking back, the closest to seeing Bucky in a hospital Steve had ever gotten was after he'd pulled Bucky off Zola's table. The army had ordered him to quarantined bedrest. But even that hadn't seemed too bad. Lying around on a cot in the aid station had seemed a far cry from being properly admitted to hospital.
Steve knew what that was like. He'd been there a few times at his worst. Suffered more at his mother's apartment when he probably should have been admitted. He'd been ill countless times, lost several weeks of his life to fevered delirium. There hadn't been much of that after Project Rebirth. He'd been invincible, impervious to the things that used to plague him. Steve hadn't needed anything resembling hospital care since Erskine gave him this life. The exception being the whole defrosting process, but it hadn't been as if Steve were aware for any of that.
And then the Winter Soldier.
"You should sit down, man," Sam said.
Steve blinked so that the scene in front of him came back into focus. The team of surgeons on the other side of a wall of glass frantically converging on their patient that could hardly be seen. The metal arm was the only thing that gave away his identity; the rest of Bucky was completely unrecognizable.
"C'mon, you're running on about half of your normal blood volume. You gotta sit."
The other half of his body's blood supply sat in plastic bags on the other side of the glass, ready to be dripped into Bucky's veins if only they could stop his body from immediately bleeding it out. Steve would have given them every last drop of blood he had if only they'd take it. The technicians were the only ones that stopped him from completely bleeding himself dry for Bucky. Steve thought he'd heard the emergency technicians say something about a spleen when they'd first unloaded Bucky from the quinjet, but he couldn't be sure. He had been too overwhelmed by the sight of the inside of Bucky's chest and abdomen being almost entirely exposed. By the tubing that entered into him by a hole in his neck. By the fact that he wasn't moving at all.
So Steve let himself be sat down in a molded plastic chair a few yards away. He could still see into the operating theatre. Never mind that he couldn't make sense of anything they were doing. And that his presence made absolutely no difference. It seemed important that he keep the whole thing within sight anyway. It would be a disservice to look away now.
Sam didn't say anything else after Steve sat, so his mind wandered away again until something new happened: someone joined them in the observation room.
"Well, you look chipper," said Nick Fury.
"Where ya been, dead man?" Sam said. He went and shook Fury's hand.
"Oh, you know," he said, "apparently in the right place at the right time."
That stoked the flames of some smouldering heat inside Steve's chest. "Where'd you find him?"
Fury gave Steve a look he couldn't decode. "An old Hydra base near the border of Romania and Ukraine."
"Why was Nat there?"
"Steve," Sam said, a warning in his voice.
"Ask her," said Fury. "Not too sure about that myself."
"Where is she?"
"Steve," Sam said again. "She's the only reason he's here at all. Let that be enough for now."
"Wilson's right," Fury said simply.
"What happened?" Steve said. All the frustration he'd felt with SHIELD when they'd first rediscovered Hydra all those years ago felt suddenly fresh.
Fury answered, "We've been tracking all the rats that didn't go down with the ship the first time. I've been taking a team to track Rumlow since he disappeared from hospital a few weeks after…well, you know. Barnes beat us to him by a few hours."
"So Rumlow did that to him?"
Fury shrugged. "Looks that way."
Steve's brows furrowed. That didn't make sense. He'd seen Rumlow's hand-to-hand combat. It wasn't bad, but it definitely didn't compare to the Winter Soldier's skills. Rumlow would have had to have gotten a lot better, and Bucky would have had to have gotten a lot worse. There were nearly three unaccounted for years though, Steve reminded himself. Who knew what could have happened in that time? He hated to imagine what sort of shape Bucky was in before he went into that fight. It was impossible to think he'd gone in at 100%, that Rumlow had bested the same man Steve had faced on that helicarrier.
"We should be glad Rumlow didn't take him back," said Sam. "Re-capture him for Hydra."
They didn't have any proof that Bucky hadn't been with Hydra in those three years. Or maybe they did, and Natasha didn't want to share it. Steve's knuckles cracked when his hands started to clench.
"Never did find Rumlow in that base though," said Fury. "He must have evacuated while his men distracted us. We know he went in for sure."
"Evacuated how?" said Steve. His heart rate was starting to pick up.
Fury shrugged. "You know how those bases are. There are about fifty different ways in and out for a reason."
"Do you know where all fifty of those exits are?"
"No. That's why the team is still sweeping the base. We'll have the whole place mapped and searched in a few hours." Fury narrowed his good eye at Steve. "What, do you want to go help them?"
"We can't be so sure Rumlow even left," Steve said in a hard voice.
"We'll just have to ask him when he wakes up," said Sam. He nodded toward the glass wall.
"Seems that way,"' said Fury.
Steve stared into the operating theatre until it was over. It took a few hours, but it was eventually over. Bucky stopped bleeding and they tied him together with stitches. They drained fluids from places where there shouldn't be fluids, hooked him up to a machine that forced him to breathe. They took images of his left arm for reference. They didn't know how it worked or how it was attached, but they could tell from the images that it was no longer supported correctly. The bones in Bucky's chest, back, and side were filled with fractures. Someone arranged the metal arm across his chest in a way that they thought would take the most pressure off the more critically-damaged structures.
They put Steve's blood into him drop by drop and said they hoped his body didn't reject it. They didn’t have any records on attempts to mix two different serum-enhanced blood samples. The words made bile rise in Steve's throat.
It was too much to look at Bucky like that, when the surgery was over. Steve saw both the Winter Soldier and his best friend in that bruised and swollen face. He remembered how terrifying those fights with the Winter Soldier were. He remembered Bucky always by his side, his untouchable overwatch during the war and all the years before that. He couldn't reconcile either of those two people with the man in the bed who needed a machine just to keep breathing.
So Steve took Sam's offer of rest and food. Sam drove them to some seedy-looking café; Steve didn't have the presence of mind to figure out what time it was and if they really needed to be going to a place like this. They ate food out of greasy foil coverings in the parking lot.
"So when are we going after him?" Sam asked when they were more than halfway through their meal. "Rumlow, I mean. Should I start packing when we get back or what?"
Steve weighed the tone of Sam's words against his own conscience. True, his instinct was telling him to board a quinjet as soon as possible and head for this base between Romania and Ukraine. He needed to see the place for himself, what had been so special about it. He didn't trust Fury's people – didn't really trust Fury, for that matter – to be thorough or forthcoming if they found anything. Steve wanted his own eyes and ears searching that base. He wanted to be the one to find Rumlow.
But that image of Bucky with the breathing machine and all the tubes under his skin was still fresh at the back of Steve's mind. He wasn't sure when he'd ever be able to accept it. What would happen when Bucky woke up? What would he be like? Drugged, alone, one of his arms bound, immobilised, to his chest, wounded beyond the point any person should still be alive; what would he think when he came to?
"I don't know," Steve admitted to Sam. "I mean, I want to be ready to go at two minutes' notice, but I don't…"
Sam didn't prod him to finish the thought. He just nodded his head, said, "OK," and took them back to the Avengers base. Sam walked Steve all the way to the door of his quarters.
Steve just barely managed to say, "Thanks, Sam."
"No problem, man," said Sam. "Get some sleep. See you in a few."
"Right. See ya."
In the privacy of his own room, Steve collapsed onto his bed. He felt wrung out and exhausted. Maybe donating all that blood was actually getting to him. A headache was building somewhere in the inside of his skull. He felt both the nervousness that he was forgetting to do something vitally important and the immense resistance to get up and act. Dragging himself upright, he made himself take a shower and drink through several bottles of water before he went back to his bed. He floated just above true sleep, mind spinning and imagining all the what-ifs from seventy years ago.
What if he had gone after Bucky? What if they'd just shot Zola between the eyes and gone on a SAR mission for Bucky? What would it have looked like, if they found him? What had it been like for Bucky to come to after the fall? Was he scared, all alone, half frozen from the ravine? How much pain had he been in? Had he thought Steve was coming back for him all those years in captivity? Well, all the years that he retained the memory of Steve. What if Bucky had remembered him on the helicarrier, and he had meant every blow he'd dealt? What if he hated Steve for leading him into hell and then abandoning him there surrounded by demons?
He'd had so much time to imagine what it would be like when he and Sam finally tracked down Bucky. There were so many scenarios he'd created in his head. In Steve's imagination, he and Bucky had reconciled and reunited dozens of times over. Hundreds even. Maybe thousands. But none of them were like this. It was always Steve and Sam who brought him in. He hadn't conceived of a universe where anyone else would be there for Bucky in his time of need. Especially not Natasha.
Steve didn't check the time when he finally gave up on sleeping, got up, dressed, and went to medical. A woman there told him that he'd need permission to go into Bucky's room.
"Permission from who?" Steve said, instantly irritated. He thought of Fury trying to hurry away with a vulnerable Winter Soldier so that he could be used again. Guilt at thinking such a thing of someone who was supposed to be his ally pooled in Steve's gut almost as soon as he thought it.
If anyone was Bucky's next-of-kin, it was Steve.
But the woman told him to wait there, and she went down the hallway that Steve knew led to Bucky's room. A minute later she came back and nodded toward him. He hurried past her and found the room himself.
Natasha was curled up in a recliner beside Bucky's bed. Her head moved slowly toward him as the door softly clicked closed. Steve knew she was watching him with careful eyes, but his gaze was stuck on Bucky. He didn't look any better than when Steve had left earlier, when the surgery was completed. Steve pulled one of the chairs beside the door to the side of Bucky's bed opposite Natasha. The mechanical hiss of the breathing machine was the only noise for a long time.
Steve's insides finally loosened up after a few minutes. He looked at Natasha and said, "Hey."
"Hey." Her voice sounded hoarse and dry.
Tendons strained in Bucky's right hand. Steve watched his splinted right hand try to make a fist of the sheets.
Steve frowned. "What do they have him on?" He couldn't make sense of all the drips and lines arranged around them.
Shallow creases appeared by Bucky's eyes. His neck strained, and his head pressed down into the pillow behind him.
Natasha was unreadable. "Not as much as you'd think."
At least he was moving on his own.
"Is he in pain?" said Steve.
"Probably." Her eyes looked glassy, and Steve tried not to notice.
Frustration surged inside Steve's chest. "There's nothing they can give him?"
He saw her shrug out of the corner of his eye. "Afraid it'll blow out one of his organs."
Lines beside Bucky's eyes deepened. Steve watched a muscle work in his jaw. Imagined the sheer discomfort of it all. It was what he had assumed it was like for Bucky when he was Hydra's prisoner. Utterly powerless to them, unable to defend himself. Unimaginable and untreated pain.
Natasha leaned forward out of her recliner and threaded her fingers through Bucky's hair a few times. When the tension smoothed out of Bucky's face, Natasha said, "Don't want anything that could even potentially slow down his healing factor right now."
Steve couldn't help looking at her then. The affection on her face was obvious. He'd never seen such naked emotion from her. Never seen her not even attempt to hide her expression. But guilt was easy to read, too.
"Thanks, you know," she said in a thick voice. He thought she might be on the verge of tears. "They must have replaced his entire blood volume twice before we landed."
Steve just noticed the rusty stains around the fingernails Natasha was trailing through Bucky's hair. "Don't thank me for that, Nat. Jesus."
Tension built on Bucky's face again, his head pressed deeper into the pillow. The metal fingers were twitching where they were secured in a sling near his collarbones. Natasha reached toward them with the hand that wasn't still winding through his hair. She held the hand like it wasn't any different than his right side. Steve listened to her murmur in low Russian to him without understanding what she said.
"How—?" Steve started to ask but then stopped. He didn't know what he wanted to know first.
Natasha took her hand off of the metal fingers. "He has a pacemaker." She shrugged. "Or something like it. Hydra implanted it when they were grafting the arm on." She held the metal hand again when Bucky shifted restlessly. "They found other practical uses for it after the surgeries."
Surgeries. Plural. Natasha had known him when he was vulnerable more than Steve did. She'd comforted him more than Steve had. He was seeing the proof right here. Even in this state, Bucky found her presence comforting. His body gravitated toward her touch and voice like it was the only safe harbour in a life that had only known storms.
"How long have you been in contact with him?" Steve couldn't stop himself from saying.
He steadfastly ignored the handful of tears that slid down her cheeks. It couldn't be that easy. He needed an answer. He needed answers to questions he couldn't even think of yet. Her silence only made him more frustrated at this whole situation. These goddamn spies.
"We've been looking for him for almost three years, Nat."
Her eyes flashed dangerously through the tears. "You have been looking."
Bucky's eyelids fluttered open for just a second. Steve saw bloodshot sclera and blown pupils. It was gone again too soon. The whole time, Natasha hadn't stopped her rhythmic ministrations.
Several moments later, Natasha said, "We've seen each other a few times. I tried to get him to stop, but it's his choice."
Stop what? Chasing after Hydra? Stop avoiding Steve? Stop running? Stop trying to kill himself in all these little ways?
But he understood what she was trying to say. It had been Bucky's choice not to contact Steve. He had gone out of his way to ask Natasha not to relay information about himself to Steve. It was Bucky's choice, and Natasha was stuck in the middle. No matter what she did, it would betray one of them. And she chose to keep Bucky's silence. After everything, that was the right thing to do. Wasn't it?
"Sorry," Steve said. "It's just…seeing him like this is hard."
Being confronted with his greatest failure made him have to see the ugly parts of himself.
Natasha wasn't ready to accept his apology yet, though. "Be glad you didn't find him," she said.
Bucky's forehead leaned into the hand she had in his hair. He seemed to settle down after several minutes. Whatever demands his body was making of him were enough to pull him into deeper sleep. Natasha kept up her quiet Russian whispers. The language barrier was the only privacy they would get from Steve at the moment. His ass was planted the minute he pulled the chair up to Bucky's bedside.
When Bucky had been still for more than five minutes, Natasha withdrew her hands and curled back into her wheeled recliner. "They'll give him painkillers when they're sure he's out of the woods."
"When will that be?"
Natasha shrugged. "Not long, hopefully. After they take out the trache and he can breathe on his own."
It was a punch to Steve's gut. His memory outright rejected the thought. Bucky, as Steve's memory defined him, never needed help breathing. His respiration had never been threatened or faulty. Something had driven Bucky to this – a state that Steve couldn't even think about accepting as reality. It didn't add up. A fight with Rumlow didn't add up without those three years' worth of blank time filled it. He wanted to hit something so badly just then.
Maybe Bucky had felt threatened by Steve and Sam pursing him?
"It's not your fault," Natasha said. The words sounded a little hollow. She sounded hollow, like there was nothing left for her to give. Yet here she was scooping out another part of her for Steve's benefit.
"Did he tell you that?"
Her eyes looked so, so sad when she looked at Steve. "He's only ever been human, Steve. Even when you put him up on that pedestal, he was a person."
Was that it? That was why Bucky didn't want any contact with Steve all those years? Because he thought Steve had expectations that he couldn't meet? That he didn't want to meet? He'd already thought it: The person in this bed was not Bucky Barnes as Steve had known him. But this person wasn't the Winter Soldier either. This was someone else that Steve hadn't met yet. This was someone that knew Natasha and trusted her implicitly. He hadn't been there for his best friend in 1945, but he could do whatever it takes to help the person time had given back to him.
"You're right," Steve said.
"He was starting to come around, though," Natasha said. She tried to smile at Steve. "He was almost ready to come home on his own."
It occurred to Steve that she may not have rested at all since she'd found Bucky at that base.
"You know, I can take next watch if you want to get some sleep," he said. "I think we're gonna be in this for the long haul."
She hummed and seemed to think about it for a few seconds before accepting. Her legs unfolded from under her and took her weight. She let her hand rest on Bucky's ankle for another moment before drifting out of the room.
Steve was alone with him for the first time since he'd dropped his shield on the helicarrier. This must have been what Sam felt like, sitting at Steve's bedside all those years ago. In a word: awful. At least Steve had been breathing on his own the whole time. He hadn't had a tracheostomy for Christ's sake.
A hand rose from the armrest of Steve's chair hesitantly. He reached out toward Bucky and slowly eased the weight of his hand onto Bucky's forearm. It was difficult work avoiding all the splints on Bucky's wrist and hand and all the tubes. He recognized the bruising pattern on Bucky's flesh fingers: They'd had to break them to set the bones correctly. At one point, he must have healed faster than it took for aid to arrive.
"Been there, pal," Steve said in a low voice.
Sitting here, it was hard to plan a mission to the Hydra base on the other side of the globe. It was hard to care about how Rumlow had escaped and where he was now. Gripping Bucky's forearm with gentle pressure, Steve decided that he needed to be the type of person that stays. At least for right now. He'd spent his whole life trying to fight his way out of every confrontation, and maybe it was time that he gave the other option a shot. It was pretty obvious what Bucky needed more right now when it came down to support or revenge.
He'd tell Sam not to bother with packing a go-bag in the morning.