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Sam and Steve find Bucky on a Tuesday.
He doesn’t move from the chair in the middle of the empty room at the center of the emptied out Hydra base when Steve skids to a halt in the door. He doesn’t even look up when Sam follows shortly after, takes one look, and says, “Aw, shit.”
He’s wearing nothing but thin grey pants and a paper sign hung round his neck. Steve can read the blocky capitals even from across the room.
HE’S ALL YOURS, CAP.
His arms are folded neatly in his lap, and greasy hair hangs over the downturned face. A thin string of drool slicks his chin.
Steve doesn’t breathe until he sees Bucky’s chest rise and fall.
“Bucky?” Steve says, softly. The word rings through the quiet room like a bell, but Bucky stays still and silent.
Steve hasn’t had this much trouble breathing since 1942. There’s ice in his lungs and blocking his throat as he slowly approaches Bucky.
“Bucky?” he says again. “Sam and I are gonna get you out of here.” A few bits of broken glass crunch under his feet. Bucky doesn’t even have shoes, but he also shows no sign of wanting to stand.
When he finally reaches the chair, Bucky makes no move to stop Steve from touching him. Steve reaches out a tentative hand for his right shoulder first, before sliding to the floor to kneel on legs suddenly weaker than they were even when he was barely five feet tall.
He grabs both of Bucky’s hands and searches for recognition in Bucky’s eyes. There’s nothing in Bucky’s eyes. Not the Soldier or the best friend who would’ve followed Steve to hell and back, nor some combination of the two, nor even someone new entirely.
Bucky stares straight through Steve, not even tracking the movement when Steve shifts to press Bucky’s unresisting hands against his lips.
“This could be a trap,” Sam says behind him, but Steve ignores him. The whole base had been cleaned out for days before they got here. There’s nothing but dust left, dust and Bucky sitting here in this chair. Bucky’s ribs are prominent against his skin, and his arms are far too light in Steve’s hands.
Both of his arms are far too light.
The left arm was facing away from the door when Steve arrived, but he has a better angle to see it now. There’s a panel near the shoulder that wasn’t closed quite right; when Steve pushes it aside, more panels slide open all the way down the metal bicep, over the forearm, on the back of the hand. Steve lets go like he’s been burned.
The arm is gutted, empty as Bucky’s eyes.
Steve rips the sign from around Bucky’s neck and traces the new scars where he now realizes the Hydra agents must have tried to remove the arm and failed, before deciding to simply take everything inside the arm instead. They’ve already healed to little more than pinkish ridges against Bucky’s pale flesh, but Steve can’t stop tracing them.
“Bucky, please,” Steve says, but Bucky remains impassive to Steve’s begging. Even when Steve brushes a hand across Bucky’s face, pushing the greasy hair out of his eyes, he only tips sideways a bit, muscles completely unresisting to even Steve’s gentlest touch. The slow rise and fall of his chest that Steve can still feel beneath his right hand marks the only difference between Bucky and a corpse.
“Steve,” Sam says from beside him, speaking in the voice he uses to wake Steve from nightmares. “You might want to read this.”
He has picked the sign up off of the floor where Steve threw it, and now Steve sees the writing on the back.
The same hand that wrote the front of the sign has left a brief note for Steve.
”Congratulations, Captain.
You’ve managed to kill off our best scientists, leaving me with only idiots to work with. The idiots in question seem to have gone a little overboard in their attempts to reset our Winter Soldier, and he’s been completely unresponsive for the past two weeks. It seems they managed to find a voltage setting that even his brain couldn’t handle. It’s fried like an egg and hasn’t shown a single sign of healing. Wouldn’t react to a single one of our tests, but we did learn that his physical body still heals just fine.
I was just going to kill him now that he’s useless, but then I thought I could leave you a little present instead. Let you know there’s no hard feelings over the whole SHIELD thing. Like I said before, it ain’t personal, Big Guy.”
A poorly drawn skull and crossbones ends the note in place of a signature.
The words have blurred into each other before Steve realizes he’s crying.
He feels like he’s crashing the Valkyrie again, or maybe like he’s the one falling out of a speeding train and watching Bucky’s face disappear above him. He is drowning in frozen waves of denial when he rocks forward, still on his knees, and wraps his arms around Bucky. Bucky falls forwards, flopping bonelessly into the embrace. A bit of drool soaks through the fabric of his suit, and his own tears are falling onto Bucky’s pants.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry.”