Work Text:
The first thing Bucky heard upon waking up was the steady beep of the heart monitor attached to his chest. As the world came into focus he could make out a curtain surrounding his bed, and the thought slowly drifted into his mind that he was in a hospital, though he couldn't remember why. He was having... Surgery? No, that wasn't it. They were doing some sort of test? Maybe. That was closer, at least. It was something involving a camera. They were looking for something in... In his stomach! That was it! They stuck a camera down his throat to look inside his stomach. There was a name for that procedure which he couldn't recall, but he didn't care. At least he had figured out why he was here.
With that puzzle out of the way, he became aware of an oxygen mask strapped to his face. The oxygen was scented, for some reason, like cherries. In the back if his mind it occurred to him that he should think this was ridiculous and what was the point in flavoring oxygen, anyway, but it smelled really nice so he reached a clumsy hand up to press the mask more firmly to his face and took deeper breaths until his head was even more fuzzy than it already had been.
Someone pulled back the curtain then to check on him, and upon seeing that his eyes were open said happily, "Oh, Mr. Barnes, you're awake!"
When they saw Bucky's hand on the oxygen mask they reached over to grab it. "Is that bothering you? Here, let me help you with it."
Bucky gave a weak protest as the mask was pulled from his face, but he soon found himself distracted by the person standing next to his bed, and he forgot entirely about the sweet-scented oxygen as his drug-addled brain could only produce one thought: Holy fuck.
He was gorgeous. He had loose blonde hair that fell across his eyes as he took notes about Bucky's vitals on a metal clipboard. His blue eyes had faint lines around them that showed that he spent more time smiling than not, and his jawline looked like it had chiseled by Michelangelo.
It was then that, unfortunately for Bucky, his brain decided it would like to reacquaint itself with spoken language.
"Whoah," he said, his voice hoarse. "You are the most beautiful fucking thing I've ever seen."
The man, whose name tag identified him as Nurse Rogers now that the letters weren't swimming before Bucky's eyes, looked up in surprise.
He gave Bucky a placating smile and said "Okay, Mr. Barnes."
"Noooooooo," Bucky whined in the most undignified way possible. "I mean it! You're like an angel fallen from heaven, which, I suppose would technically make you Lucifer, which I guess would be why Hell is so hot." Did that make sense? Sure it did.
"Thank you," Nurse Rogers said, his thin smile turning into an amused grin.
"What are you doing tonight?"
"I'm sorry, but I don't date patients.
"That's okay, we don't have to date, we could just hold hands."
Nurse Rogers looked like he was trying really hard not to laugh, and a quiet voice in the very back of his mind was whispering that he shouldn't be saying all of this, but the louder part of his mind couldn't figure out why. So he kept going.
"We could go to the park and have a picnic, or we could-" he stopped mid-sentence and gasped so suddenly and dramatically that Nurse Rogers actually jumped a little, and his grin changed to a concerned frown.
"We could get fondue!" Bucky whispered loudly, like it was the most brilliant idea he had ever had in his life. "Do you like fondue?"
"I do, actually," Nurse Rogers said, his smile returning as soon as he realized Bucky's gasp wasn't caused by pain or discomfort.
"Then we'll have fondue! We'll have fondue and we'll hold hands, but we won't kiss, because that would make it a date." Bucky heaved a loud sigh. "I really want to kiss you, though."
Nurse Rogers finished writing on the clipboard, and slid the pen under the clip at the top.
"Your friend is in the waiting room," he said. "Why don't we bring her in and then we'll get ready to send you home."
"No, don't go!"
"It'll only be for a second," Nurse Rogers reassured him. "I'll be right back, I promise."
He disappeared through the door and as soon as he was gone, Bucky could take full stock of his surroundings. He was in a recovery room of some sort, and he could see other beds past the curtain, but they were all empty, and judging by the silence, he was completely alone.
It wasn't for long, though as, true to his word, Nurse Rogers reappeared a few minutes later, Bucky's friend Natasha following closely behind him.
"Natashaaaaaaaaa!" Bucky cried out, and in that moment, he felt as though he'd never been happier to see her in his entire life.
Natasha stopped dead in her tracks, shocked confusion written all over her face before she broke out in a grin.
"What did you do to him?" she laughed.
"We put him on one milliliter of morphine to keep his throat from hurting after the procedure," Nurse Rogers explained. "That, plus the anesthesia tends to leave people pretty out of it when they wake up."
Natasha pulled a chair next to Bucky's bed and sat down. Bucky leaned over to her and whispered in a voice that is far louder than he intended, "Nat, have you met Nurse Rogers?"
Natasha wasn't even trying to hide her laughter. "Yeah, Buck, I have."
"But look at his face, Nat! It's just so... just so..."
And then, in a mood swing that can only be blamed on the anesthesia, he was openly weeping over the perfection that was Nurse Rogers' face. Tears streamed down his cheeks and his chest shook with sobs as he choked out, "He's just so pretty!"
He was still crying when Nurse Rogers detached the wires from his chest and pulled the IV needle out of his hand.
"Do you think you can stand?" Nurse Rogers asked.
Maybe it was the crying, or maybe it was the fact that he wanted any excuse to stay, but he suddenly felt very tired.
"I don't wanna," he grumbled. "I wanna sleep."
"Come on," Natasha said. "Let's get you home and then you can sleep all you want."
With her help, he swung his legs around so that he was sitting on the bed. Then Natasha and Nurse Rogers gave him some privacy so that he could change out of the hospital gown and into his own clothes. It took some struggling, but he finally managed, and Natasha came back and helped him stand and walk the few feet over to where Nurse Rogers was waiting with a wheelchair. He sat down heavily and the nurse wheeled him out of the recovery room and down a few wide hallways until they were in the hospital Lobby.
Nurse Rogers sat with Bucky while Natasha pulled her car up to the entrance and Bucky tried his hardest to stay awake. When Natasha arrived, he helped get Bucky settled in the passenger seat.
"You take care now, Mr. Barnes," he said.
Bucky gave him a sleepy grin. "Bye!" he called, waving his hand loosely as Natasha pulled away.
It wasn't until they were halfway to his apartment that he came back to his senses enough to realize what had happened.
"Oh my god," he said, clapping a hand over his mouth.
Natasha glanced over at him before turning her eyes back to the road. "And he's back!" She smirked.
He couldn't remember everything, and what he did recall felt like some sort of dream. "Did I flirt with the nurse?"
Natasha laughed. "Yeah, you might say that."
Bucky buried his face deep into his hands. "Oh my god."
"You also might say that you did everything short of propose to him."
Bucky screamed into his hands and Natasha laughed harder.
When they reached Bucky's apartment, Natasha followed him inside and made him chug an entire glass of water before she left.
Bucky flopped down in his bed, wallowing in his mortification. The fact that he would probably never see the nurse again did very little to comfort him as Bucky replayed the parts of the afternoon that he could remember over and over in his mind. He pulled his blankets up over his face and hoped that they would suffocate him as he slept.
They didn't, of course. Not that night, nor the night after. On the second day after his procedure, Natasha sent him a video of himself crying and muttering something about Nurse Rogers' perfect face. He didn't even remember her taking the video, though he wasn't surprised that she had. She would be taking some sort of perverse pleasure in his misery.
With actual, visible proof of his idiocy before him, Bucky began wrapping himself tighter in his blankets at night as he slept. But the next four nights, just like the two before them, also denied him the right to a quick and easy way of escaping his embarrassment.
Which was why he was sitting in the waiting in the hospital a week later, both very much alive and very much hoping that today was Nurse Rogers' day off. Apparently Natasha had been kind enough to schedule him a follow up appointment to discuss the results of his endoscopy on the way out, and then had conveniently neglected to tell him about it until he couldn't cancel without having to pay for the visit anyway.
He bounced his leg up and down nervously as he filled out the paperwork the lady at the front desk had given him. He just wanted to get this over with so he could be out of here as quickly as possible without bumping into the nurse.
"James Barnes?"
Bucky looked up. Standing there, ready to lead him to the examination room, was none other than Nurse Rogers. Fuck.
Without the fog of the anesthesia clouding his mind, Bucky could see that he was somehow even more handsome than he remembered. Fuckfuckfuck.
Nurse Rogers stared at him expectantly and Bucky realized that he was waiting for him to follow him to the back.
Bucky got to his feet and shuffled slowly towards the nurse, and followed as he led him into examination room three.
"Alright," he said, closing the door behind Bucky. "Take your shirt off and lie down on the table."
"What?!" Bucky yelped.
Nurse Rogers grabbed a stethoscope from where it was looped around his neck. "I'm going to check your heart."
Oh. Oh, of course that was what he meant.
Bucky did as he was instructed. As Nurse Rogers placed the cold stethoscope on his chest, Bucky glared at the ceiling. He knew it was far too late to present himself as cool and charming, as he normally would when face to face with someone he found attractive, so he decided to come across as a detached asshole in an attempt to preserve his dignity. Of course, that was going to be near impossible, considering he had cried in front of the guy. No, it was worse than that. He had cried in front of the guy while wearing a garment that exposed his asscrack.
Nurse Rogers had him sit up, and as he did, Bucky caught his reflection in a mirror hanging on the wall. What he had thought was a glare definitely turned out to be more of a pout. Bucky quickly rearranged the features to look more 'I-could-kill-you-just-for-looking-at-me' and less 'I-asked-for-a-toy-at-the-store-but-my-mom-woildn't-buy-it-for-me.'
If Nurse Rogers noticed him making faces in the mirror, he kept mercifully quiet about it and moved the stethoscope to Bucky's back and told him to take deep breaths. Finishing that, he moved on to measuring Bucky's height, weight and blood pressure.
He was in the room with the nurse for maybe five to ten minutes at most, but each agonizing second that dragged on was a second of pure torture, where Bucky had to use every last bit of self-control he had not to blurt out, 'Hey, so you remember the other day when I said you were beautiful and then I cried and stuff? Haha, yeah, sorry about that,' because that would be breaking the pact he had made with himself to never speak of it again.
Bucky was eternally grateful that Nurse Rogers was a professional about the whole thing. This sort of thing must happen to him all the time, Bucky reasoned. Good looking guy like him, placing himself directly in the path of poor souls under the influence of powerful drugs. Hell, maybe he did it on purpose just to stoke his ego.
Finally, Nurse Rogers finished and wrote his findings down on a clipboard, which he put in a bin hanging on the wall for the doctor to look at when he came in. "The doctor will be with you shortly." He paused at the door and practically raked his eyes over Bucky's bare chest. "You can put your shirt back on," he said, the tiniest smirk gracing his lips.
Bucky blanched. Professional, my ass!
He pulled his shirt over his head and swung his feet idly back and forth as he sat on the bed and waited for the doctor.
His phone vibrated in his pocket. He pulled it out and found that he had a text from Natasha.
'Hey,' it read. 'How's your appointment?'
'I hate you,' he typed back.
After a few moments his phone buzzed again. 'Is the hot nurse there?'
Bucky scowled. 'Can you at least pretend like you're not loving every bit of this?'
It only took a few seconds for Natasha to respond, but it wasn't with a text. It was a video attachment of him sitting in the car after they left the hospital. Bucky didn't want to press play, but he knew that the video was probably material the Natasha was going to use to tease him mercilessly later, so he tapped the the little triangle in the middle of the screen and braced himself for the worst.
"-an't decide," Bucky was saying as the video started. "Which do you like better, Nat? Bucky Rogers or Bucky Barnes-Rogers? Or maybe he'll take my name. Nurse Barnes sounds kinda nice, donchya think?"
He could very distinctly make out Natasha giggling madly in the background and he scowled.
'You could have at least had the decency to crash and put me out of my misery.'
'And miss all the fun? Never.'
'Fuck you.' And then, as an afterthought his fingers flew across the touch screen of his phone and he added, 'What does it mean if he ogled me without a shirt after he finished the exam?' Okay, so he hadn't ogled him, exactly, but it had been close enough and Bucky didn't quite know what to make of it.
He didn't get to read Natasha's reply because the doctor came into the room then, greeting him quickly and taking a few moments to read his chart before he pulled out the images of the inside of Bucky's stomach and sat on a rolling stool next to the table to explain what they had found.
The pictures were gross, but Bucky found himself starting to relax. Well, as much as a person could when they were being told that they had a stomach ulcer. Nurse Rogers had already come and gone, and he had survived the ordeal without making a bigger idiot of himself, so all in all, he'd call today a win. You know, health issues not included.
"I'm prescribing you some medication to help reduce your stomach acid," the doctor was saying, as he wrote on a prescription pad. He tore off the top sheet and handed it to Bucky. "You can also make some changes to your diet to relieve the discomfort. Steve is gathering some pamphlets and articles about what kind of foods are safe and which ones to avoid. He'll be in shortly to go over them with you."
Every muscle in Bucky's body tensed. Was Steve another doctor? Or was Steve Nurse Rogers? He had a terrible feeling he already knew the answer. Because fate would fuck with him like that. It was entirely because of bullshit like this that he had an ulcer in the first place.
The doctor asked him if he had any questions, and Bucky tried to think of something, anything to say to delay the inevitable, but his traitorous mind remained stubbornly blank, so he shook his head and the doctor went on his way.
He pulled out his phone to text an SOS to Natasha, but when the screen lit up it displayed the text that he hadn't gotten to read.
'It means you quit sulking and shift your flirt into maximum overdrive.'
Right. Yeah, that made sense. Be so disarmingly charming that Nurse Rogers (Steve) forgot entirely about how much of a fool he had made of himself. If there was anything Bucky Barnes had in excess, it was charm. He could do this.
But then Steve walked into the room, all smiles and dimples, and Bucky's resolve faltered. He couldn't do this. Fuck.
He hadn't realized he had said the last part out loud until Steve let out a surprised laugh. "Not the response I usually hope for when I walk into a room, but I'll take it."
Bucky ducked his head and stared at his own lap. Maybe if he didn't make eye contact this would be easier.
Steve crossed the room and sat on the stool that the doctor had vacated only moments before. “Okay, Mr. Barnes-”
“Bucky,” he corrected, because if he was going to die of embarrassment in an examination room, he sure as hell wasn't going to go out as 'Mr. Barnes.'
“Bucky, then, I just have a little bit of information to...” Steve trailed off when he realized that Bucky was still staring at his lap. “I know my beauty can be intimidating sometimes, but you don't need to be shy.”
Bucky snapped his head up quickly to find a smirk resting easily on Steve's face as though it had every right to be there. Great. Not only was Steve one of the hottest guys Bucky had ever met, but he was also, apparently, a sarcastic little shit. And fuck if that wasn't exactly the type of quality that some twisted part of Bucky found ridiculously attractive.
“You know,” Steve continued, his face a mask of mock seriousness. “I've never seen anyone cry like that before.”
Bucky was about to spit out some biting remark, because, really, this was just taking it too far, but then he looked at Steve's expression and found that there wasn't even the slightest bit of malice. Steve's teasing somehow consisted entirely of warmth and the scathing insult surrounded by a string of swears that Bucky had prepared turned into a good-natured, “Keep it up and you're going to see it again.”
Steve threw his head back and laughed in earnest and a little part of Bucky melted inside. “Yeah, okay. Fair enough.”
Bucky had to say it. Steve was being so good-humored about it and making it so easy for Bucky to feel comfortable, that he no longer felt embarrassed addressing the situation directly. “I'm really sorry about all that, by the way. I hope I didn't make you feel awkward or anything.”
“Does this mean you don't really want to kiss me?” Steve asked innocently.
“Right now I kinda want to smack you, actually,” Bucky replied with a grin.
Steve laughed again, and Bucky wasn't typically one for making grand hyperbolic statements, but goddamn if it wasn't the most beautiful sound he had ever heard.
“So I just need to go over these pamphlets with you,” Steve said. “about what foods are safe to eat. Now, fondue isn't strictly on here but if you stick to reduced fat cheeses you should be fine.”
“Actually,” Bucky confessed, “I honestly have no idea where that came from. I hate fondue.”
“Alright,” Steve said, “not a problem.” He flipped open one of the pamphlets. “We'll just have to find some other food you can eat. Do you like fish?”
Was he suggesting what Bucky thought he was suggesting? “Uh, yeah, I guess.”
“Great! I know this amazing little seafood restaurant. It's on the river, and has the most amazing view.”
“You said you didn't date patients.”
Steve looked up at him confused. “Who said anything about a date?”
Bucky's heart stopped. He had just made an ass of himself in front of this guy. Again. He was just beginning to berate himself when Steve's face broke into a grin.
“Kidding.”
Bucky groaned. “You can't do that to a guy, man! I have an ulcer!”
“Sorry.” Steve had the decency to at least look sheepish. “And I don't date patients. But in a week I'm transferring to another hospital.”
“So in a week I won't be your patient, anymore.”
“Exactly. So, what do you say? Seafood restaurant next Friday?”
Bucky was sure that he had the most absurd grin plastered on his face, but he didn't care. “Yeah. Yeah, I'd like that.”
“Alright, then it's a date. But only the kind where we hold hands.” Steve stood up from the stool and made his way to the door.
“Am I ever gonna hear the end of that?” Bucky asked.
Steve gave him his widest shit-eating grin. “We'll see.” He opened the door. “Oh, and be sure to set up another appointment with Karen, the doc wants to see you in about a moth or so to check in.”
Bucky followed him out the door. “Will do!” he called, as Steve disappeared into another examination room.
Bucky made his way to the front desk, and set up the appointment. The lady behind the computer wrote the date and time onto a small appointment card and handed it to him.
Bucky entered the information into the calendar on his phone and was about to throw the card away when he noticed there was something written on the other side.
He flipped it over to find that along the top of the front side of the card, Steve had written his name and phone number. Bucky grinned and entered that into his phone as well, before he took a picture to send to Natasha. He quickly typed out a short text to accompany it and hit send.
'So. Bucky Rogers? Or Bucky Barnes-Rogers?'