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The adrenaline wears out five miles out of HYDRA’s former weapons facility, and Bucky’s exhaustion comes up to meet him, as well as a pain in his side that feels as bad as it looks. There’s a lot of blood - a lot - and he chances a hand under his own shirt to feel out the edges of the wound while Steve is crisscrossing back through the motley crew of soldiers limping their way back toward the wrong side of the Western Front. It’s definitely a gunshot wound, Bucky thinks. There’s a bullet in his belly and he hadn’t even noticed. Any second now he’s going to go down and it’ll break Steve’s heart to see it, to have come all this way, crossed an ocean and parachuted into enemy territory to save his life, only to lose him twenty miles from safety.
He thinks about his Ma too; thinks about the funeral they’ll have to have. It’s not the first time the thoughts have crossed his mind. He’s been in the trenches. He’s had shells flying over his head. Steve will wear his best dress uniform and his Ma and sisters will be all in black, and the white gravestone next to all the other white gravestones will be as featureless as all the others around it, defining him not as Bucky Barnes - unique and individual and buoyant and flirty - but as a body for the cause, a soldier, like all the others resting in the dirt around him.
But at least he’ll make it home. Steve will carry him the rest of the way. Steve, who’s grown big and strong and brave, and Bucky still doesn’t know how that happened but here he is . Steve won’t leave him here in the mud.
Bucky rubs the blood from his hand on the inside of his jacket quickly as he hears Steve shout for him to wait up, and they fall into step together again, Bucky still working through the very grimmest line of thoughts, his mind running a mile a minute. He’s a walking dead man. That’s all he knows for sure. He’s dead already. It’s just a matter of how long his body will keep standing and moving before it gives up entirely.
They have to camp in a bombed out hamlet: two stone houses, a six foot tall chapel and a well. There’s barely any cover, but there’s water and there’s a lot of folks who need it. When Steve asks Bucky to help distribute it, Bucky considers asking Steve to come and sit with him for a moment so they can talk, but what would be the point? He can be useful for a little longer. He can take water to the wounded and the sick. HYDRA hadn’t spared them all that much, and they’ve marched a long way without anything to drink.
He makes it through another sixty minutes, stares death in the face as he comforts a dying man, then goes to sit beside the well to wait for Steve, his head in his hands.
“You good?” Steve asks, as he sits down beside him, and Bucky forces through a smile. Waves him off. Of course he’s good, he’s free from HYDRA isn’t he?
He lets Steve curl up beside him, and only then does Bucky realize how tired Steve is, pushing through his exhaustion to get the job done. Bucky holds him closer, nuzzling into his hair, breathing in the scent of Steve and home and dreaming of something he won’t ever see again.
There’s a moment where Steve looks up at him, sleepily, and brushes a hand against his cheek, then his lips against his mouth. It’s a feathery kiss, stolen when everyone is just too tired and grateful to look, and Bucky feels his heart leap. Somehow he’s dying and this - this - is the perfect moment; the one he’s been waiting for his entire life. But before he can say anything Steve is snoring against his shoulder, and Bucky smiles and makes himself into a more comfortable pillow. He doesn’t want to drift off to sleep. If he does that, he might never wake up, but the Sandman pulls at him anyway and he’s too tired to resist.
By dawn, Steve is already up and about, and when Bucky inspects his belly in the gray light, washing away some of the blood with water from the well, the pink of rapidly healing skin is all that greets him.
And a single round bullet, dark with dried blood and tucked into the folds of his shirt.