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SAM
Sam Wilson thinks that if anyone has a reason to be afraid of some dripping water, it’s Scott. The puddle on the floor could drown an ant many times over.
Sam Wilson never thought he’d see Steve Rogers turn tail and run from something a mop or hell, a few paper towels could fix, but Sam Wilson’s stopped being surprised at much these days.
Drip. Drip.
“Fuck,” says Sam.
~~~~~~
It hasn’t been long since they put Bucky back on ice, like he’s a bottle of champagne that should be saved just a bit longer. Or a box of popsicles they wouldn’t want to let melt. Except that’s what’s happening right now, somehow… Bucky is melting.
Rather, the cryo didn’t take. He’s thawing out as Sam watches, drawing a line on the floor in water using the toe of his combat boot. Bucky is thawing, Steve is running away, and Sam should’ve never taken that early morning run (you know which one) and should’ve just slept in.
~~~~~
STEVE
T’Challa matches Steve stride for stride on their dash back to the room where Bucky is being kept. When they arrive, Sam steps aside, boots squeaking wetly on the tile, and T’Challa makes a noise that sounds a little like a hiss.
“That shouldn’t be happening,” Steve says, jabbing a finger towards Bucky and the growing puddle. “Tell me this isn’t happening.”
T’Challa places his fingertips together, considering. “Get the doctor,” he says quietly over his shoulder, his tone soft but unmistakable in its power.
~~~~~
Lukewarm bathwater, wet spots on the knees of his jeans, Bucky rousing in levels, eyes glassy and unfocused. Steve doesn’t notice his own hand trembling as he reaches to push Bucky’s long hair out of the way, and Bucky’s eyes slide closed again as he gives a full-body shiver.
“He feels warm,” Steve says in surprise, hand still on Bucky’s forehead. “...Too warm.”
It turns out that Bucky is running a fever, which shouldn’t be possible. Then again, neither should supersoldiers and aliens (little green men) and physically impossible big green men. Not to mention gods and magic and any number of things Steve has experienced since his own defrosting.
“Mr. Barnes is hyperthermic, yes,” the Wakandan doctor notes. “I suggest we get him dry and in a bed.” Her tone is far from suggestion, and Steve leaps up immediately, that all-American can-do all ready to can-do whatever the doctor asks.
One of T’Challa’s ever-present entourage has helpfully wheeled in a hospital gurney from somewhere, along with a stack of towels and some neatly folded black sweatpants and a grey sweatshirt that, when unfolded, proudly reads TRUMP 2016: MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.
“Excuse me, but can I say the fuck?” Scott pipes in from where he’s been hanging back by the side of the room.
“He tried to get my support,” T’Challa shrugs. “He likes black people when they’re rich enough to run countries.” He ducks his head, a tiny smile playing at the corner of his lip. He gestures at the sweatshirt. “I found it ironic, so I kept it as a souvenir.”
~~~~~
The whole situation seems even more ridiculous once they have Bucky bundled up in the Trump sweatshirt and the doctor is hooking Bucky up to an IV and taking some blood. Semi-conscious, Bucky doesn’t even flinch when the needle pierces his arm. Steve tries not to think about how many times that must’ve happened to Bucky for it to no longer cause any reaction.
Now that he’s dried off, Bucky no longer looks half-frozen. His cheeks have taken on an unhealthy blush, and his breathing has started to be… noticeable.
“What’s wrong with him?” Scott says what they all want to.
“I’ll be running tests,” the doctor says, deftly removing the tube of blood, her tone commanding as ever. She softens, though, when she sees the looks of deep concern reflecting all around her. “For now, let him rest.” She briefly places a hand on Steve’s shoulder, then nods to T’Challa, and is gone.
Steve pulls a chair up next to Bucky’s bed, uneasily remembering how Buck used to do this for him, too long ago.
“Where there’s fire, there’s smoke,” T’Challa says softly, from Steve’s elbow.
Sam snorts. “What are you saying, cat-man?”
T’Challa raises an eyebrow. “I mean that there is a reason for this, and we will find it.” He’s so earnest that Steve wants to believe him, wants to believe that he’ll blink and another 70 years will pass, Bucky’s arm will grow back in flesh and bone like he’s an axolotl, that he’ll open his eyes and the world will come into focus less flashy and digital and more softened around the edges, pincurls and red, white, and blue.
LET’S MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. Steve fingers the wording on the sweatshirt, his lip curling.
Steve doesn't believe in America right now. Or greatness.
Steve doesn’t believe in a goddamned thing, not any more.
~~~~~
The flu. Bucky has the flu. He’s not contagious, even though now he’s started coughing chestily in his sleep.
It’s a special flu, the doctor tells the assorted motley crew of former avengers: a supersoldier, a guy who can friggin’ fly, an ex-con, and a prince.
It’s a special flu made just for Bucky, one that was triggered by a non-Hydra cryo freeze. It’s not contagious, and most likely not lethal-- just awful enough to make the Asset want to crawl (since that’s all he’d be able to do at that point) back home to Mother (Russia).
Still, it seems almost anticlimactic- the flu, of all things. At least until Bucky spikes a fever of a hundred and five, murmuring deliriously in Russian until Natasha arrives, bare-faced, her hair scraped back into a messy ponytail.
She orders everyone else to get out, voice low and unmitigating.
“Steve--” her voice catches him around the ankle like one of the spider-boy’s webs. Only fitting, the Black Widow thing and all.
“Yeah?”
“Get me some water and a washcloth, would you?”
Steve blinks momentarily, remembering Natasha just days ago, in skintight black and false lashes, holding T’Challa at bay so that he and Bucky could escape. Somehow she looks even fiercer now, with dark circles under her eyes and yoga pants that say PINK on the butt.
Something about the way she looks at him once he’s brought the requested items, something about the way she lays the dampened cloth on Bucky’s forehead-- Steve can’t help it. He drops to a knee in front of her chair and catches her in a bear hug.
“Nat-- I’m sorry,” he says.
“I know,” she says, and returns the hug for a moment before drawing back, meeting Steve’s eyes.
“Tony called me a double agent,” she confides. Steve’s anger is akin to Bucky’s fever- white hot and sudden. His hands clench into fists and he has to stop himself from breaking his skin with his fingernails. (That had happened before, back when he first got the serum and wasn’t familiar enough with his own strength; was still rattling around in his skin, feeling like he didn’t quite measure up. The shallow cuts had healed before he’d even dripped blood.)
“... He wasn’t wrong.” Natasha smiles crookedly. Steve leaves it at that, clasping his hands behind his head and pacing on the too-white tile. Bucky stirs a bit then, and snarls something in Russian, his voice giving out into a coughing fit.
Nat speaks to him softly, her voice lilting. She re-wets the washcloth and reapplies it.
“What’s he saying?” Steve asks. He doesn’t speak Russian, in fact doesn’t speak a lick of anything but plain old Brooklyn-tinged American English. (Something for which Tony had teased him, what feels like eons ago- saying that America was multicultural in the 40s and was even more so now, so wasn’t it high time for Captain America to at least start in on a little Spanish or Chinese? Steve had found the critique hardly fair; it’s not like he’d had Rosetta Stone in cryo) However, he’d thought that he’d caught something that sounded like his own name amongst the raspy syllables.
Natasha bites her lip, distracts herself with laying the back of her hand against Bucky’s neck. “He’s exhausted,” she says finally. “Give him time.”
Steve walks out. This time he breaks the skin.
~~~~~
BUCKY
Bucky’s cold. This is nothing new. Russia? Cold. Cryogenesis? Cold. Being passed over (again) for a dame (not to mention one blood-related to Steve’s ex)? Fuckin’ icy.
Bucky’s boiling. Not surprising. The Winter Soldier hardly belongs in tropical Africa.
The next time he wakes up shivering, he manages to swim up to the surface of consciousness (or was it Steve who had done that? Pulled him out of the water?).
“Cold,” he manages to say, and Sam jolts awake in the chair next to his bed.
“Cap,” Sam calls out into the hallway. “Your boy’s a bicycle over here!”
“What?” Steve’s head appears in the doorway, and he looks at Sam instead of at Bucky.
“Your boy’s a bicycle,” Sam repeats. “A Bucky icicle.”
“Huh. Guess I’ll go tell the doctor, then, and we can see how that fever’s doing.” Steve’s gone again before Bucky can say anything else. Sam’s typing rapidly on his phone.
“Nat’s on her way up, too. She’s been worried about you, bro.”
Bucky shuts his eyes again-- he must not really be awake yet, because he can’t imagine that all of these people actually care how he’s doing or feeling. The Soldier always just soldiered on through, even when they yelled at him for (not healing fast enough, getting sick, they didn’t pay for a weapon to be taken down by simple biologic agents) the failures of his non-mechanical components.
Bucky’s all failure now; a rough conglomeration of cells and telomeres that should’ve been done regenerating decades ago. He’s sure that Steve and the others will be able to see this by running any number of simple tests on him. He keeps his eyes shut when Natasha pats his arm gently.
“Bucky? We’re going to take your temperature now,” she tells him evenly. “Is that okay?”
Bucky says nothing, but opens his mouth enough for the thermometer to slide underneath his tongue. He doesn’t mean to peek, but it happens anyway. He’s surprised to see Steve there, but figures Steve probably wants to know how long it will be until they can put him under again.
There's a beeping noise. Steve takes the thermometer, squints at it. “Hundred and one even,” he says. “That’s real good, Buck. Much better.”
Steve looks like he's about to say something else, but then the doctor bustles in, looks at the thermometer herself, feels Bucky’s throat, listens to his chest. Steve gets pushed back in the tangle of people and stethoscopes and then he's just--gone.
~~~~~
Bucky doesn't remember a lot about his ultra-pyrexic state. Natasha tells him that he yelled in Russian and that she sang Cheburashka to him. Sam lets it slip that Steve climbed onto the hospital bed and held Bucky when he couldn't stop shivering. Steve doesn't say anything except “you were real sick there, Buck,” and doesn't do much beyond stand at ease in Bucky’s room, watching him with a soft expression on his face, when he thinks Bucky is sleeping.
Slowly, slowly, Bucky gets better. He eats soup and crackers and plums. He drinks water and tea and something Sam tells him is called Gator-Aid. He starts to talk with Sam about the things that happened in Siberia and the small glimpses of other places the Soldier went. He was lying when he told Tony that he remembered them (all of them). Somehow it scares him more that he doesn’t.
Sam lets him know that that’s okay. Might even be better, all things told. Sam gives him room to talk, to be silent, to sleep without a weapon under his pillow (or attached to his shoulder).
~~~~~
They even start to bring Bucky small gifts. Sam has seen how interested Bucky has been in Sam’s smartphone, and brings him one of the same kind, and helps him learn how to use it. He even installs something called an “app” to the phone that allows Bucky to type with one hand. Sam brings movies (with a weird fancy glitter to them that Sam calls “special effects”) and music and funny stories about Steve that make Bucky laugh until he coughs.
The Wakandan doctor gives him small white pills that she explains will help with anxiety and depression. Bucky takes the bottle with uncertainty. He doesn’t have to take them if he doesn’t want to, the doctor had said, but she thinks that they would help. Bucky leaves the bottle on the side table for the next day, considering, until Scott pops in for a visit, sitting in the designated bedside chair, turning it around backwards and resting his arms on the back.
“I take those, too,” Scott tells him mildly, pointing to the pills. “I had a rough time after my wife and I split up and I couldn’t see my daughter.”
“Do they help?” Bucky looks down at his blankets.
“Yeah, man.” Scott’s answer is so immediate and sure that something just seems to click. Bucky reaches out for the pill bottle. After Scott helps him open it (“we’ll have to get you a different bottle, dude, lemme see what I can work up in the lab”), he shakes out a tablet onto Bucky’s palm and Bucky swallows it with a big gulp of the purple “Gator-Aid.”
Natasha shows up one morning with something cradled in her arms. She carefully shuts Bucky’s door with her elbow and slowly sits on the edge of Bucky’s bed, pulling her legs up into a criss cross yoga-like position. “I brought you something,” she says. “I thought about asking you first, but then I saw her, and…” she shrugs, that crooked little smirk pulling up the corner of her mouth.
“Her?” Bucky asks, confused.
Natasha opens her arms a bit, and a pointed little face pokes out. Black nose, glossy black fur, intelligent green eyes. The cat tentatively takes a few steps forward onto Bucky’s blanketed legs and torso, and Bucky pays close attention. Black whiskers, long skinny tail, and… three legs? Wait. Bucky blinks and looks again. He reaches his hand out slowly for the cat to sniff and gives Natasha a questioning look.
Nat shrugs, her smirk turning into a real smile. “I wanted to get you a dog,” she says. “You know, to fetch stuff for you, lick your face… but then I saw this little girl and I just knew she was perfect.”
Bucky’s never had a cat before, or a pet of any kind. He’s not sure what to do, but the cat starts to rub her face on his hand, then his arm, and eventually on his face, arcing into his touch.
“I think she likes you,” Natasha notes mildly.
“I guess,” Bucky shrugs, the cat now climbing on his shoulder. He ducks his head before Natasha can see his own smile.
~~~~~
Bucky continues to improve. It’s not easy, and he has a small relapse, the fever creeping back up the morning after a day when Bucky had been proud of himself for showering on his own and walking around the hospital hallways with Sam.
He loses his appetite, feeling shivery and achy. The cat glues herself to his side, purring quietly. Sam brings a plum tart (God bless Wakandan cooks and import laws) and a movie, knocking softly before coming in the room. Bucky’s dozing fitfully, but he rouses when he sees Sam.
“How you doing today, big guy?”
Bucky clears his throat. “Don't feel so good.”
Sam bends to give the cat a quick pat. “I have just the thing. You're gonna love the movie, man, trust me.”
Sam’s right-- Bucky does like the movie. They have to pause here and there for some contextual exposition by Sam and for Bucky to cough.
As the credits roll, Bucky bites his lip. “Trinity,” he says, and points at the cat.
Sam pauses for a moment, then laughs heartily. “Trinity… man, you're too good.” He claps Bucky on the shoulder that still has an arm attached to it, and Bucky smiles. He finally believes that Sam actually likes him, wants to hang out with him out of something more than obligation to Steve.
Before he leaves, Sam shows Bucky how to take a selfie. Bucky prefers to take pictures of the cat, instead. “Is that okay?” he asks Sam worriedly, like he thinks Sam will take the phone away.
“Of course, man, of course. Makes you a real 21st century man,” Sam reassures him, and smiles. “Besides, Trinity’s the real looker here; no one wants to look at your ugly mug.” He laughs, and after a moment, Bucky does too.
~~~~~
Bucky naps that afternoon and has good dreams for once. When awake, he manages a few bites of the plum tart and even uses his new phone to ask Natasha and Scott if he can eat dinner with them, outside of his hospital room. He swallows Tylenol along with his anxiety meds and pulls his long hair back with an elastic from Natasha. Trinity supervises all of this activity intently, squeezing her eyes up at him. Bucky tosses a piece of crumpled up paper onto the floor for her, and she skitters after it wildly before pausing abruptly to wash her leg. Bucky snorts, and the phone dings: Natasha suggests that Bucky join her, Scott, Sam, and T’Challa for dinner. She'll come and “pick him up at his room” in half an hour.
Bucky types “where's Steve?” into his message back to Nat and then erases it.
Steve’s not there and everywhere. Steve’s standing in front of him and letting him say that cryo is the best thing for him, for everyone. Steve’s agreeing through omission and all Bucky wanted was for Steve to just say no, to say, come on, Buck, we can work through this together. But instead Steve had just stood there and watched as Bucky froze to not-quite death.
Bucky shivers and is smoothing down the Trump sweatshirt (Nat had cut the empty sleeve off for him with a big pair of scissors) when Trinity pricks her ears up and mews at him. Moments later, there's a knock at the door.
“Come in,” Bucky calls, expecting Natasha.
It's Steve.
Bucky stands there, frozen (not a new position for him), and then Steve’s wrapping him in a bear hug. Steve’s crying and telling Bucky how sorry he is and how wrong he was to let Bucky go back into the ice.
“I was just sick about it,” Steve says, still hugging Bucky.
“Apparently, so was I,” Bucky says, and coughs deeply to make his point. Steve releases the embrace and laughs.
There's another moment when Steve meets Bucky’s eyes and doesn't look away.
“I'm not interrupting, am I?” Nat pokes her head in and Bucky could swear she's smirking. “Good to see you again, Steve.” She brushes past the men and sits on Bucky’s bed. Trinity hops up after her and Natasha pets her absently.
“You ready to go? Still feeling up to it? You look a little flushed,” Nat stands up and puts her palm on the side of Bucky’s face. “Hm. You feel a little warm, but not bad.”
“I'm good.” Bucky clears his throat. “Let's go.”
~~~~~
It seems Bucky’s appetite has returned along with Steve. He lets Sam fill a plate for him, eats second helpings of everything on the table until his belly hurts. He finds that he enjoys this slight discomfort; it is of his own making and volition. When T’Challa asks who wants ice cream, Bucky is the first to say yes.
After dinner finds them all in a fancy living room in T’Challa’s suite. Bucky collapses on a leather couch, pats his sore belly.
“Yo, can you move your ass over?” Sam asks.
“No,” Bucky replies, but he smiles, and Sam and Nat both squish themselves in next to him anyway.
He's not fixed yet- he's not naive enough to think that. But this, here- friends pressing in warm against him, fitting into the empty space where Hydra’s arm used to live, the little black cat snoozing on his bed, a full stomach, the hint of something in Steve’s gaze- that's all he needs right now.