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Today’s goal: get out of the house before Steve notices that Bucky isn’t actually fit to be outside.
The reason that he isn’t fit to be outside is that he feels like microwaved hell. This is normal—he’s felt garbagey on and off for the past who knows how many years. What isn’t normal is that he’s actually starting to care about it. Meaning, emotionally. It always mattered physically, he hurt, but he didn’t have the presence of mind to think it mattered.
Now it matters. Now that he’s free from Hydra’s grasp, he’s expected to actually somehow conduct some semblance of a life. Even though he’s time-travelled to the bizarro-world future, even though endless freezing and unfreezing and countless fights has left him with a body only functions properly when it feels like it. The knockoff serum keeps him halfway functional some days, but other days…
On other days, his new body is a lot like the one that Steve used to have. And today is an Other Day.
He shoves his aching, twitchy legs into his pants. This takes longer than it ought to. He hasn’t gotten the hang of moving around with one arm yet, or moving of his own volition at all. The fabric feels weird, makes him too aware of his skin.
Next is the shirt, which is a Captain America logo t-shirt that’s too big for him. Anything too tight, anything touching his skin, makes it feel electric, crawly, like tearing it off. He’s done this once or twice and Steve had to patch him up. Back then, he couldn’t use his one hand long enough to do it.
Shoes on and he’s walking toward the door. Well, walking is too generous a term. Limping maybe, or hobbling. Whatever it is, it isn’t graceful. He has to hold the wall with his one arm, and his vision keeps shimmering black. His chest is tight, his breath coming out in painful, undignified grunts.
Suddenly he’s on his knees, his hands slapping the wooden floor. He opens his mouth, preparing to give himself a pep talk, but instead of words vomit spills from his mouth. Fuck, he hadn’t even been nauseous. Fuck, now he has to clean it up. With supplies he doesn’t have, because that was part of what he was leaving the house for—refilling on cleaning supplies and groceries, meaning actually contributing to the fucking household for once. He should have done this shit last week when he felt reasonably okay.
He can hear the shower running. Good, that means he still has about fifteen minutes to get cleaned up and get out of here. Steve’s showers take a reasonable amount of time—unlike Bucky’s, which can take up to an hour if he’s feeling shitty enough.
Bucky rolls onto his back so he can sit up without using his one arm for support. Cleans the vomit as best as he can with a dishrag, while holding his breath to keep himself from puking again. That whole debacle takes close to five minutes, and by that point he’s drenched with sweat, panting, his heart beating much too fast.
He has to sit down again, to accommodate lungs that won’t cooperate with the whole breathing thing. He’s been having draining, hour-long coughing fits lately, where he can’t catch his breath, can’t move. It reminds him of the asthma attacks Steve used to have. He almost misses that—not Steve’s suffering, of course not…something else. He can’t think right now.
The coughs come hard and fast like a hammer to the ribcage. All his thoughts close in around airlessness until he’s dribbling blood and then he doesn’t care that he can’t breathe, then he’s just clawing at his head remembering all the times he drew blood from people who weren’t even his enemies…but these aren’t enemies. These are his lungs. He is coughing up blood because freezing and unfreezing his lungs has them functioning about as well as they would if they were tubercular. Most of the time, anyway. Some days, the serum has him humming along almost perfectly.
This should be the end of the coughing fit. The climax, the dramatic moment, has ended. The blood appeared, so by the logic of storytelling, everything ought to ease off now. But it doesn’t—he just keeps coughing. When Steve gets out of the shower, he’s still doing it. When Steve heads into the hallway, kneels down beside him and starts rubbing his back, he’s still doing it.
Steve is saying something but Bucky can’t hear him. Steve’s knuckles are brushing the ridges of Bucky’s spine.
“Are you okay?” Steve asks. This is a dumb fucking question because the answer is obvious. He provides an equally dumb answer and says that he’s fine as soon as he finds enough breath to speak.
“Why are your shoes on?” he asks, hands kneading the pain out of his back. “Were you planning on going somewhere?”
“I was gonna get groceries.”
When he says it, it sounds ridiculous. Groceries, in his condition? Walking more than thirty feet in any direction? Absurd. Back when it was Steve choking on his own closing throat, Bucky always told him to lie down. To let Bucky take care of anything that had to be done immediately, and wait on the rest until he felt up to it. Duties, as he saw it, could be pushed to the side to conserve energy for fun things, like partying and picking up girls.
And here he is wasting all his strength trying to go to the damn grocery store. Strength he used to have. Strength that Hydra took away from him.
Steve tells him that he doesn’t need to get groceries. That he’ll go, as long as Bucky feels well enough to be left alone for an hour or two. That he could ask their roommate/boyfriend Sam to get them. That if he doesn’t, they can order burritos from the Mexican place on the corner, and worry about groceries tomorrow.
“I can’t eat burritos, you idiot,” Bucky mumbles, stretching his legs out in preparation to stand. “Remember, I can’t digest beans and cheese anymore? Plus the chicken at that place tastes like unwashed ass.”
“The carnitas are good,” says Steve. “You could get that?”
Bucky smacks him lightly, shakes his head. “Tell that to my mother. It’d break her heart to know her baby boy wasn’t keeping Kosher. Plus there’s still the rest of the burrito.”
“We’ll find something else, then,” says Steve, still dutifully rubbing his back. Ignoring the fact that no one is ever telling Bucky’s mother anything again. “Anything you want,” he says.
Bucky is about to reply, but he’s stopped by another coughing fit. This one flies out of him like a demon from a body under exorcism. He flops over on his side, nearly crushing Steve’s hand in the process. It’s harder to catch his breath now than it was after a full day of military training, and there’s enough blood that Steve notices. “Bucky, you need to be in bed,” he says.
“Nah…wouldn’t want to…hhhh…” His lungs seize up and he can’t say anything, just expel more blood from his hellhole of a mouth. When he finally sucks up enough air to talk he says, “wouldn’t want to mess up your nice sheets with all this blood.”
“You mean the ones I bought at Target for $35? Yeah, I’ll be devastated if you get those dirty. Come on, let’s go. Do you need help getting up?”
Clearly he does, and right now his body’s needs are interfering with his pride. He lets Steve carry him bridal style into their shared bedroom, lets him lay him down and tuck him in and clean the blood from his face with a washcloth.
“Good thing it’s you here and not Sam, huh? I don’t think he could lift me that easily…”
“I don’t know—Sam is pretty strong.”
“Not serum strong, though.”
This is, of course, completely ridiculous. Yeah, Sam isn’t strong like Steve…but Bucky is supposedly “serum-strong” too, and here he is being carried to bed like a goddamn princess.
Steve says something that Bucky doesn’t process, so he asks him to say it again. Steve obliges without comment, bringing unwanted memories of the time when he’d teased Steve for not being able to focus on anything that was happening while he was spiking a 104 degree fever. He’d done that because he was nervous, because the fever was scary and he didn’t know what to do besides make jokes.
Steve, on the other hand, seems confident. He says, “I’m going to plug in the humidifier—it’ll be much easier for you to breathe.” And then he does it. He says, “I’ll get a bucket in case you puke again.” And the bucket appears. He says, “I’ll make you some tea.” And suddenly there’s a cup of tea on the side table.
“This is fancy,” Bucky wheezes. “What is it?”
“Gyokuro. It’s a Japanese green tea. I’m trying out things we couldn’t get back in our time. Sam says it’s his favorite. Anyway it’s supposed to be good for your health in general…it’ll definitely help your throat after all that coughing.”
There’s a moment of silence. Bucky isn’t sure if he’s quiet because the general pain of speaking, or the specific pain of what he isn’t saying.
“You know, you don’t need to be doing all this for me,” says Bucky, wiping a scum of blood and drool from his mouth. “You probably have something else lined up for the day besides taking care of me, right?”
“I did have plans, but none of them are so important that they can’t be cancelled if necessary. I have to make sure you’re okay.”
“Really, Captain America has the spare time to tuck his former enemy into bed? You absolutely have more important things to do.” He stops talking, swallows a shivery breath and coughs hard. “I’m fine. I can take care of myself. I’m not any more fucked up than I usually am. I’ll probably be fine in a couple of days.”
“Pretty sure that’s what I used to say to you, minus the Captain America part.” Steve says, sitting on the edge of his bed. “Actually, I’d have been trying to bust out of bed. Remember that one time you had to sit on me to keep me there?”
Bucky can’t help grinning at this. Yeah, he remembers. Steve used to be so irresponsible about his health. He never took it into account when he decided to do things, which meant that Bucky had to take it into account for him.
Steve always said that he couldn’t let his body keep him from living his life.
Right now, Bucky doesn’t have a life to be living. Just memories of having his body manipulated by Hydra’s hands to hurt people.
Hydra’s hands are still fucking controlling him. Making him cough up blood onto Steve’s $35 sheets from Target. Making him and Steve trade places like some kind of ridiculous cosmic joke.
“Steve I…”
“You what?” Steve wipes the blood that Bucky missed from his chin.
“I…” Bucky sighs. Drags his hurting body into seated position. “I hate this. This whole situation. This was never supposed to be me. I was never supposed to be this weak.”
“I know the feeling,” says Steve, nodding. “That was my whole life up until the war. I was always fighting my body, trying to make it do what I wanted, and it just wouldn’t. It was the most frustrating thing in the world. Sometimes I forget it’s not still like that.”
“Right, but you started out like that. I didn’t. Our whole relationship is built around me being stronger than you!!”
Goddamn it, he hadn’t meant to say that. Steve blinks, tips his head back. Sighs. “I was strong in my own way,” he says. “And I think you knew that.”
Of course he did. Steve fought tooth and nail to do what he wanted to do, despite the screaming protest of his small, frail body. Back then, Bucky thought real strength lay in accepting your limits. That Steve’s frenzied attempts to join the military were a fool’s errand.
But look how well things went for Steve, and how terribly they went for Bucky. Who cares who started out with what body. Steve has always been stronger than Bucky where it counts, and he always will be.
“I know,” Bucky says, wincing at a bolt of pain zigzagging through his chest. “I’m sorry. I’m just so frustrated…and I don’t understand why you’re wasting all this time on me. I’m literally a murderer. I don’t deserve…”
“You said yourself that you had no control over it. Hydra used you. You were their weapon. The only thing you can judge yourself on is what you did when you had choices.”
“Well, now I don’t do anything,” Bucky snaps bitterly. “I just hang around the house all day coughing and groaning while you go be Captain America.”
“Like I used to have to lay in bed coughing and groaning while you went off to be Bucky Barnes.” Steve sighs. “Look, it’s okay. You’ll get used to it eventually. I can help you get used to it. Some things will get better, some won’t, but you’ll be okay. You’ll figure out how to be Bucky Barnes again.”
“I don’t even know what that means anymore,” says Bucky.
“I don’t know either, but I don’t have to. It doesn’t matter. Whoever you are, I’m—”
“With me until the end of the line?”
Steve offers a weak grin, and Bucky laughs. “You’re such a nerd. Look man, you gotta get to the grocery store before it closes. Get your shoes on.”
“I’ll call Sam and ask him to get them,” says Steve. “He owes me—I did his laundry the last three times, and I’ve been doing all the dishes.”
“Doesn’t that mean I owe you too?” asks Bucky. “When was the last time I did anything around here?”
“You’re excused until you get another good day. Even then, I might let you off the hook if you find something enjoyable to do with it.”
Bucky waggles his eyebrows. “I can’t possibly imagine what you mean by enjoyable,” he says.
“Of course you can’t,” says Steve, gently pushing Bucky back onto the bed, and resting his head on his shuddering chest. “Anyway, I’ll stay here with you, then Sam and I will cook dinner when he gets back with the groceries. Sound good?”
“Yeah.” Bucky grabs Steve’s hand, squeezes it. “Sounds good.”