Chapter Text
The nightmares were coming back. It had been two weeks since Bucky had gone back under. Probably almost to the hour, Steve realized, but he pushed the thought out of his mind and shook his head as he sat up in bed. It was late in the day, and considering how much he hated the nightmares it was borderline ridiculous how much he was sleeping. Waking up to the reality of Bucky being gone was worse than the nightmares, and it didn’t help that Bucky’s absence perpetuated them either. It was selfish of him, he thought. Bucky was right, he thought — of course. Best to let Bucky sleep it off, so to speak, until they figured out how to suck all of Hydra’s venom out of his system. If that’s even possible. Steve shook his head again.
He felt guilty, because he felt selfish, because he was lonely again. Bucky was right — but Steve had just got him back. And now Bucky was gone and Peggy was gone and he had gotten damn good at hiding how lost he felt living in a world where everyone who could actually relate to him was either dead or in a nursing home. That skill was waning, and being alone helped. Returning to his apartment in New York had helped marginally, at most enabling him to nurse his perpetually growing desire to stay in bed all day. He missed Tony, yeah. And he missed Nat and Sam. But if he tried to brush aside the aching pit in his stomach and the gap in his heart to which Bucky had so ephemerally returned, he’d go crazy. The others could go back to normal, let Bucky’s absence slide, but not him. He had no idea how Clint did it, leaving his wife and kids. Steve would have dropped his shield and never looked back, and jesus, he did, and he still lost Bucky.
Freight car. The nightmares were almost always in the freight car. And Steve felt selfish again, selfish that somewhere in him he was actually glad Bucky had fallen, glad because if Bucky hadn’t fallen and Steve had woken up from the ice to Bucky old, Bucky dying, Bucky in a nursing home and forgetting Steve’s name every time he walked in the room, Steve would have unraveled. And it was worse, too, thinking about the torture Bucky had endured at the hands of Hydra. Thinking about the fact that Bucky remembered killing Tony’s parents.
And Bucky still couldn’t do anything to stop it.
Bucky couldn’t do anything… not then, and he couldn’t now. But I can, Steve thought. I owe it to him, he thought. But he didn’t know where to begin.
Steve laid back down, turning his head into the pillow and willing himself back to sleep, to get out of reality and back into the nightmare of the battlefield.
He awoke to a pounding on the door. His head throbbed with each bang, and he swung back the covers and wiped his eyes and his forehead, his hair drenched in sweat. That damn freight car. I didn’t catch you then, Buck. But I’d catch you now.
“I’m coming!” he yelled, stumbling into a pair of jeans and out of his room to the front door.
It was Natasha.
“Oh,” Steve said when he opened the door. She raised an eyebrow.
“‘Oh?’ That’s all you got? After two weeks of being AWOL and I get an ‘oh.’”
Steve sighed, and opened the door wider to let her in.
“Right. Okay,” she said, her expression skeptical but wondering as she followed him inside and shut the door behind her.
“You gotta talk to me.” Natasha looked him hard in the eyes with that no-bullshit, firm jawline insistence she did so well.
“I’m sorry, Nat, really I am,” Steve replied, knowing he sounded weary but unable to hide it. “It’s been rough, after what happened, you know…”
“With Stark? Yeah, I get it. We all get it.”
Steve opened his mouth to say and Bucky but shut it and nodded. Best to leave it at that, because saying Bucky’s name wouldn’t do anything except make him want to shut himself in his room and go back to blocking out reality. Go back to that asshole freight car he hated so much and couldn’t leave. It wouldn’t solve anything. Bad move on his part, though — Nat took in his whole thought process like he had just narrated out loud everything that had gone through his head.
“Okay, here’s what I think.” Nat seemed resolute. Steve swallowed, his throat dry.
“You’re Captain America,” she began, and this time it was Steve who cocked an eyebrow.
“But — “ she continued, holding up a hand to show him she wasn’t done. “But, you’re not just Captain America. You’re Steve Rogers. You’re a soldier. You’re a World War II soldier and what that means is that you’re a World War II veteran, Steve. A vet. You’re the weirdest veteran alive but it’s still part of who you are.”
Steve was silent. He wasn’t sure what point she was trying to make. It seemed obvious that yes, he was a vet. So what?
“So what,” Nat continued as though she were responding to his thoughts again, “is that you’ve seen some shit and no amount of the me-time you spent frozen in a block of ice is going to help you get over any demons you’re hiding from the rest of the world. Like a normal goddamn human being.”
“Okay,” Steve responded, getting impatient. “So say you’re right. Prescribe me something to get my head to shut up. What do you honestly want me to do?”
“Just that,” she said wryly. “Well, no, not that exactly, but Steve…” She paused, looking up at him cautiously. “Steve, don’t you think you might have some form of PTSD you’ve never seriously addressed?”
He stared at her. The term wasn’t even as old as he was, how could he know? But she took his silence as an answer. “Okay, okay, sorry. Sorry if that was too forward. But Steve,” — she had that no-shit look in her eyes again — “I can’t help you, but you gotta do something about it. Talk to Tony or call him or — “
“It’s not about Stark!” Steve raised his voice, then shut his mouth quickly, but it was enough. Nat almost looked shocked, but she maintained her composure. A moment passed, and then —
“Bucky?” she asked.
Steve wanted to go to sleep. “Yeah, Nat. Bucky. Okay?”
“But Bucky’s not gone, and now that you know that — “ but Steve was shaking his head again, cutting her off with a sigh.
“Huh uh. No, just… I don’t know what you want me to say, Nat.”
“You don’t have to say anything to me,” she replied, her voice quieter. “But you have to do something, something for yourself.”
A silence fell between them. Natasha looked uncomfortable. Steve felt lost.
“PTSD, really?” he finally said. She nodded.
“If you don’t want to talk to someone right now, Google it or something okay? God, shut up, I don’t know!” she grinned as Steve laughed at her suggestion of him “googling” anything.
“Okay. I’ll “google” it. Who knows,” Steve replied. It felt good to smile. “Maybe I’ll find something.” She nodded, returning his smile.
“You gotta call me if you need help with anything, setting something up for you, a ride, it doesn’t matter.” Her voice was firm.
“Just… don’t get out of touch again, okay?” she implored. He ducked his head and thanked her, and she turned for the door. That was one thing he’d always liked about her. She got done what she needed and she didn’t feel the need to stick around, over-nurse the moment. They said farewell and he shut the door and turned back into the silence of his apartment, her words echoing in his head. He did need to do something. PTSD was a foreign subject to him, a relic of a, well, a newer time. It wasn’t something anyone his age would have thought about, it wasn’t an element of being a soldier then, at least not one that had a label. It was just suffering. But now…
Steve looked around the room. His eyes fell on his seldom used phone, tucked neglectfully away next to a stack of papers on his coffee table. Couldn’t he get Google on his phone? He was pretty sure it wasn’t just a computer thing. Worth a shot, he thought, grabbing it and keying in the phone’s passcode. The screen flashed on with a click, and his fingers brushed clumsily through the little square apps on the screen until he found the one he thought would do “internet.” Sure enough, the rainbow of Google letters flashed across the screen when he clicked on it and he tapped the search bar, carefully keying in letters for his search.
PTSD, his fingers said.
About 23,000,000 results, Google answered.
Steve frowned, and clicked on the search bar again. He tried PTSD medicine, PTSD therapy, PTSD memories. He rifled through Google, coming up with nothing that looked helpful, then —
Injection can ‘cure’ PTSD in Veterans, Google said.
Fox News, Google said. Steve was about to click away from it, having heard enough about avoiding Fox News, but a sentence in the link’s description caught his eye.
“The most marked improvement is in sleep — the nightmares going away,” the sentence read. Steve hesitated. Was it what he wanted? Sleep wouldn’t go away — just the nightmares, he realized. That was enough for him, and he clicked on the article.
A simple injection. 15 minutes, $1,000, apparently a lot of vets who had taken it had shown dramatic improvements. It was supposed to turn off nerve growth factor activity, activity related to massive stress and flight-or-fight reaction. Steve wondered if it could have any effect on him and the super-soldier serum pumping through his veins, but he scanned through the article and re-read the sentence about it helping with nightmares and made up his mind. It was enough. Nat was right, he had to do something. There wasn’t a damn person in the world who could empathize with him — except Bucky. Shut up, shut up! — so it seemed to him that medical treatment had just as good of a chance to work as therapy. Besides, he was an old pro, a really old pro, at the whole injection thing. He smiled, tired but resolute, and glad Nat had stopped by. He knew she’d support any decision he made. He exited out of the Internet and pulled up the keypad to dial Nat’s number. He could somewhat navigate his way through a smartphone, but he still wasn’t quite ready to give up memorizing telephone numbers. Given the surreptitious nature of his line of work, it came in useful sometimes.
Nat didn’t sound totally convinced, but just as he’d thought, she agreed his judgement was best and even offered to help him set it up before he had the chance to ask for her help. Within an hour of their phone call, she had gotten back to him with a time and place, and offered to accompany him. He gladly accepted.
The appointment was in a week. Evidently being associated with the Avengers had its perks, because Steve was pretty sure anyone else would have had to wait much longer than that, gone through background checks, the whole nine yards. It seemed rather amusing to Steve when he thought about the trouble he went through to get into the army. Now sometimes it felt that nothing stood in his way that he couldn’t mold into his favor. On the other hand, he got the feeling Nat could have set the appointment up for the next day, but deliberately chose not to, so that Steve could have time to think his decision over. But, if anything, the additional week just reinforced his longing for the injection. Yeah, he was looking forward to it, but the anticipation hadn’t stopped his nightmares or driven the thought of Bucky from his mind. A heavy sense of selfishness still pervaded his thoughts, nagging him that this wasn’t doing anything to help Bucky, but he knew his current state of gloomy stagnation wasn’t getting either of them anywhere. So when the day arrived and Nat pulled up outside of his apartment building with one of her jokes about him being an ancient historic relic, he was ready.
The process was simpler than Steve anticipated. His expectations for an injection process were alien to anything medically normal, and the absence of the straps on the side of the hospital bed along with the fact that nobody shot his doctor after the process was complete was darkly amusing to him in the context of his reignited memories. The examination pre-injection was simple as well, the doctors hiding their amazement at his vitals as they moved on to inquire as to what were the worst elements of PTSD that he experienced.
With neither hesitation nor specifics he answered that it was the nightmares. It was because of this answer that upon completion of the injection the doctors requested that Steve allow them to sedate him briefly to test whether the nightmares had disappeared. Steve was surprised.
“Just like that?” he asked. “You think they’ll be gone?”
The answer seemed more hypothetical than empirically grounded. “Past procedures were proven successful when the patient was exposed to his source of stress and demonstrated an involuntary lack of a PTSD-induced reaction,” one doctor explained. “For you, if it is true that sleep in any form serves as your main trigger of the nightmares, then it may be plausible that inducing sleep will demonstrate success or failure of the injection.”
Steve was not completely convinced, but it didn’t seem to be a bad suggestion and he agreed that it was worth a try. The doctors had to triple the amount of sedative needed to fight off the super-soldier serum, but eventually he felt himself dozing, falling…
Bucky falling.
Steve screamed —
snow whirled around the freight car and Bucky was gone, Steve was yelling his name but he was gone —
the rails were shaking, the ground was shaking, someone was shaking him —
“Steve. Steve!” Someone was shouting his name. Steve’s eyes flew open to see the doctors standing around him, their eyes filled with concern and… fear? He wasn’t sure. But he was angry. The injection didn’t work and he’d wasted his time. He tried to sit up in the hospital bed but the doctors stopped him, encouraged him to lie back down. Angry and upset, Steve didn’t want to comply, but he didn’t want to fight, either. Bucky falling was seared in his mind, his skull pounding as Bucky’s screams echoed through his head and Bucky’s eyes stared into his soul, projected in his brain as if they were on a movie theatre screen. He screwed his eyes shut harder, trying to block out the image.
A moment later, he heard Nat’s voice. She entered the room and hurried to the side of the bed, laying a hand on his cheek and asking him to open his eyes. Unwillingly he obliged, shaking her hand from his face as he did.
“It didn’t work,” he said, his voice curt. She looked disappointed, and there was sympathy in her voice when she spoke.
“They told me they sedated you. Who knows if that’s a good reflection of the injection’s effect on you? Maybe natural sleep will give you better results. Sedatives can have unexpected effects on the body.”
Steve looked up at her, dejected, but realized while she was talking that he did feel different. There was something…
“I don’t want to sleep,” he said suddenly. Nat paused to give him a chance to talk, but it was all he had to say.
“I don’t want it. That’s different, that’s a change for once.” He considered for a moment, then just repeated himself.
“Yeah, I don’t want sleep,” he told her. I want Bucky back.