Work Text:
It’s Sunday. That awkward time in the middle of the month where the paycheck’s landed in the bank account, the regulars are all restocked, and Steve fiddles with minimal excess, flipping pages on the banking app on his phone the way others might read the newspaper.
Put it in savings, he probably should. Not that $82 would do much but perhaps a few more fractional cents’ worth of interest to the modest money-pile that sits, waiting for him to spend it on who-the-fuck-knows-what.
He could spend it on gas, back and forth to the farm a couple times. Ferry Bucky for sunshine and sustenance. The peaked roofs of the apartment buildings lend their area just a bit paler, greyer, like the sidewalk, even in fully blossoming Spring. But out in the country, with no large objects causing shadow, save the barn’s growing, leaning shape, always ensuring the trampoline isn’t overheated…
Steve happens to know the peeling Adirondack chairs are stacked beside Clint’s overwhelming tool station, just inside the barn door. “All fixed up and repainted every year,” he’d told Steve on their last visit. “I swear Leila’s gonna make me do pink and purple stripes this year…” he’d shaken his head.
Steve had laughed. Then he’d caught a glimpse of Laura settling what had to be a pair of Clint’s sunglasses on Bucky’s nose. He kept twitching, then apologizing. But on their way home, Bucky turned the case for Steve’s Ray-Bans over and over in his hands. “How do you spell ‘Oakley…?’"he’d asked.
But treating Bucky… Steve’s done it to death. The weighted blanket. The heating blanket. The cooling blanket. Always brand name, made in America. No replicated junk meant to entice with low face prices, only to disappoint later with shipping fees, shipping times, and abject disasters when they showed up.
They’d been abject disasters when they’d shown up anyway. The weighted blanket was… tolerable. For three hours or so, until Steve accidentally lay down on top of it on his side of the bed whilst Bucky was asleep beneath it on the other, and, upon spooking awake from Steve still isn’t sure what, he’d panicked, assumed he was bound, subconsciously jumped into the reflex to fight. He got sick. He stayed scared. And for the first time in memorable history, Steve broke city waste guidelines and threw out an armload of garbage without placing it in a plastic bag first.
The warming blanket was better, keeping Bucky from trembling and going grey when he went to bed alone. Steve assumed it was for night use only; Bucky would toast himself between the sheets while Steve showered or moved the laundry or did the dishes, then they would unplug the thing and use it as a footwarmer over the end of the bed, slowly cooling as they shared body heat up top. But then… things started going downhill. Faster than skiing straight from the lift with poles abandoned, Bucky dropped from slim to skeletal. He’d take coffee. Black. Finish perhaps a quarter of a mug. Maybe he knew Steve was disappointed, a bit scared, even. Maybe he was scared himself. So Bucky let Steve kiss him before he left the bedroom, descended the stairs, and headed off to work. It took a couple of days of repetition for Steve to catch what was soon began happening, its danger, and how much he detested himself for putting things that way to begin with. He’d call around for Bucky, still in his work shoes, then, inevitably, start flipping on lights as made his way up to the bedroom. Steve’s hands, pink and lightly warmed from rattling on the handlebars of his bike while swathed in their thick leather gloves, felt like ice lifting Bucky’s wet hair away from his neck. So much sweat had pooled around his sacrum and in the crook of his stomach and curled-up legs that he might’ve wet the bed.
Bucky’d shrieked. Steve had broken the cord connecting the blanket to its controller, putting too much force behind his attempt to unplug all the attachments so he could throw the thing in the wash. Now broken, Steve threw the blanket in the corner and rushed for towels. He even searched the back of the closet for a soft waterproof pad he’d taken as a hand-me-down from a retired police dog, just in case Nat talked him into hot yoga again. Steve found it. He also found a decrepit suitcase with only one wheel, into which he shoved the blanket, not even bothering to fold.
The next morning, Steve kicked Bucky downstairs to lie on the sofa and watch television. He could have as many blankets as he wanted, as long as they were cotton, and he didn’t move from the spot where Steve had tucked the dog pad into the crevices of the sofa. Already blinking at almost-muted and double-captioned Deadliest Catch, Bucky didn’t notice Steve making a second trip upstairs to get the suitcase, nor did he seem to know that Steve took the car rather than his motorcycle. The car generally yielded Steve a quicker route, but not that day. He pulled off and threw the case into a woody patch a little ways off the highway. He hoped then, and still does now, that if anyone went to open it, they were relieved not to find the man the heat-trapping fabric and shoddy conduction coils had nearly killed off.
Last payday’s extra bits had purchased a new set of bedding, yet again. Something’s going a bit off with Bucky’s internal workings, and although the high temperatures outside haven’t topped the mid 80s Fahrenheit, he seems to break into a warm, clammy sweat as soon as he walks into a room with windows during daylight hours.
The apartment manager won’t flip the overall temperature control system from heating to cooling until the start of June, so there’s nothing Steve can really do about it. He’d be willing to throw the spare cash at the electric bill, if it would make Bucky feel better, but it’s a dead end.
So are the oscillating fans in the corners of the living room and bedroom. Despite their claims and expense, the output is low, and Bucky can’t hear over their background buzz unless they’re turned to the setting that wouldn’t affect the flight path of a gnat.
The next best choice is up in the laundry room, waiting for Steve to get of his ass and go from pretending to be productive to actually beating those last few weekly requirements out of the last possible day before it’s back to the workweek grind.
Waterproof mattress cover. Cooling blanket. Cooling towels. Waterproof pillow cases. A memory foam positioning block, set with ripples of supposedly therapeutic blue gel. Some of it is out of its packaging, some of it isn’t. Steve thinks he tossed the once ultra-compressed mattress pad that had started blooming like unwatched bread dough into the washing machine, if not just to keep it from taking up the entire closet-sized room.
As he mentally recounts his purchases, what they’d looked like in and out of the formidably-sized mailing boxes, and how they may work once they’re put to use, Steve hears a slumping thud coming from just that vicinity of the upstairs.
The poorly constructed, yard-long hallway made up of a the doorframe of the linen closet, an inch of uninsulated stud covered in plaster and paint, and the doorframe of the laundry room is an echoy mess, even though it’s carpeted, and the tile under the washer and dryer compresses under Steve’s toes. Something about the lack of insulation, or the way the strip of middling wall either vibrates the house or begins to disintegrate if touched with a hammer–Steve had attempted to anchor the touch-light with a nail, as indicated in the instructions. In the end, he’d internally cringed as he chose to go with a Command Strip instead. It all makes him a little nervous. For getting the deposit back, if nothing else.
But, no. Steve’s sure the wall composed of pressed powder hasn’t combusted this time. He’s already responding before his mind is done processing the sound. Did it end with the slight creak of the stressed carpet-backing? No, more like the unsettling, deflated-basketball sound of flesh on the tacky flooring in the yoga studio, guaranteed to be made with at least 50% recycled products. Steve’s narrow knowledge of bumps and bruises that sound like that are generally the result of people slipping in their own sweat.
He isn’t sure what the cheap, screenprint-linoleum crossbreed sounds like when impacted with, say, a shoulder, or a head, rather than the twist-on foot of something large, square, and aluminum.
Steve takes the stairs two at a time, abandoning his phone on the bench between the coat rack and front door. No distractions. Rescue only.
It might only be the top of the washer popping open, Steve tries to tell himself. Maybe he started the load. The mattress cover might’ve gotten too saturated. Too much soap? Maybe it’s all just an I-Love-Lucy moment.
But Steve’s gut tells him that’s not quite the case. There was no metallic ring to the noise. Even the clanks of him stacking up the change he finds in the dryer sounds distinctive, alloy against non-matching alloy clashing like they’d be kicked out of the marching band.
The washer didn’t pop randomly. He never started the load, Steve knows. The dryer vacuum seals, even though the rubber inside the portal-style door looks like it’s been chewed by a stray puppy. There’s only one kind of disaster left. And Steve really hopes his extra funds aren’t going toward a copay for a weekend visit to the ER.
"Buck?” Steve asks as he thunders into the hallway, grasping both edges of the doorway to slow himself to a stop before he carries on into the large, square appliances, no matter of the mess dominating the floor in between.
“Oh.” Steve lets out his breath as he slowly sinks to his knees. “Buck. Hey, it’s me…”
Bucky’s legs splay at a slightly odd angle, but the feet turned in opposite directions basically tell what’s happened. A simple trip over the toes, or maybe a premature tripping over the reflection of the toes caught in the front of the shiny white washing machine. Steve’s been a little dubious of Bucky’s vision for a while. Just like he’s been dubious of his hearing. But since Laura sent the gift certificate and Steve spent three painstaking hours with his laptop on max brightness, scrolling again and again through all the customization options, Bucky’s barely taken the Oakley shades off–if not his eyes, than perched atop his head. Oakley makes prescriptions, Steve recalls. Maybe that’s where he’ll bank his dollars…
“Steve…?” It’s slow. And it’s a question. Neither of which bode well.
“Yeah,” Steve returns brightly, pretending he neither knows nor cares. “You ok?”
“I–uh–” Bucky makes a shallow swallow that doesn’t move anything past his cheekbones. He rotates his neck from sideways to upright as if to try again, but gives up and returns to the original resting position. “Fell down, I think.”
Bucky’s torso, measured from the side, can’t be more than six inches, spine to widest rib. There’s a clear arch separating his lumbar region from the floor; any meat or fat he had back there must’ve been lost over winter when he slumped over into bad habits and bedrest and baggy sweatshirts. His swim trunks won’t fit him, Steve thinks, with a hit of sadness. The Bartons will dig out the above-ground pool soon. Not that Bucky would want to be seen in swim trunks. Or even be able to handle the exertion of pool play.
Bucky’s face stays grey, and he starts to gag-swallow again. There’s a dribble of clear fluid on the floor, indistinguishable from laundry detergent or even water, but Steve gets what’s going on. He scoops his arm behind Bucky’s neck and takes gentle hold of his stump shoulder, which is flush against the front wall of the dryer. Steve carefully tips Bucky upward and sideways to let him couch and drain the mucous slug before helping him arrange himself forehead to knees as they wait for the worst to fade.
Steve keeps four fingers perched on the crowning bumps of Bucky’s spine. His thumb pets fine lines over the muscle stretching outward to Bucky’s good shoulder. The skin and bone and sinew all tremble as if stuck in perpetual motion, still riding momentum from power set behind an action long since forgotten.
“’M sorry…” Bucky mumbles into the deep cradle of his pelvis. He’s nearly given the echo of a cavern, considering the empty space between his concave ribs and stomach and the flats of his thighs.
“It’s not like you meant to.” Steve shrugs. He doesn’t intend to be flippant. But he’s done laying blame. “What can I do to help?”
“I don’t know…” Bucky deflates, as little as he’s able to. A bit more of him falls toward the floor, and Steve shoves his knee behind Bucky’s shoulders to keep him from flattening out and experiencing the hardness of the fake tiles again.
Fearing he’s lost Bucky into the haze of depression-speak again, Steve tries changing his wording. “What do you want? Right now, what can I do?”
Bucky pauses a moment. “Get this taste out of my mouth?” He raises one eyebrow, but the rest of his face looks small. Sad. Like he’s taking basic comfort and making it into a luxury only a king could deserve.
“Of course.” Steve nods. “Bathroom? Swish-n-brush, or something like that?”
“Ugh.” Bucky gulps. “Pointy things down my throat…”
Steve lets his lips form a concerned half-smile. “Yeah, there is the gag reflex to consider. What else could we try?”
Bucky blinks. Presses his mouth into a line. “Um. Coffee?”
“Like, downstairs breakfast coffee?” Steve’s surprised, and he wants to clarify.
Bucky looks slightly embarrassed as he nods. “Yeah…”
“Alright.” Steve’s willing to play along. A couple calories. Definitely a serving of comfort. Maybe a little more nervous energy than strictly necessary. “Do you mind if I give you decaf?”
“Hm.” Bucky’s cheek twitches as he gives a hoarse half-laugh. “That would be fine.”
“Good.” Steve leans in close and gives Bucky a kiss on the temple. “'Cause I plan to keep you.”