Bruce Banner
Bruce Banner was perhaps the world’s leading expert on remaining calm in times of deep emotional crisis.
It was a good thing, too. Steve Rogers was a mess.
“But you can fix him,” he insisted stubbornly, for the hundredth time that night. “You can.”
“I’ve drained the pulmonary effusion as much as I could without collapsing the lung…but Cap, he’s septic. Bad. He’s immunocompromised by the starvation—“
Smart, a clinical part of him said. Any immediate danger to the Soldier’s bodily integrity would trigger his protocols for self-preservation, but Barnes had found a work around. A painful, agonizingly slow work around. Barnes had wanted to be dead, just as Bruce longed to be.
…and Barnes had made it work.
He felt guilty letting him die. He felt even guiltier taking that victory away.
“But the neural interface on that arm is massive, Steve. It’s draining every last molecule of glucose from his blood, the ATP from his cells, it’s burning through him and I can’t feed him any faster without risking what little access we have.”
So take off the arm, Steve didn’t say. Steve had read the files as much as he had, understood little, but it was obvious even to a layman that the arm—whatever they’d done to Barnes to interface his spine, his brain, his soul with that arm—was permanent.
He’d done some preliminary genetic testing already. Similar mutations to PEPCK-C, like Steve had, the accelerated metabolism, increased speed of healing, seeming impermeability to fatigue and pain…and enough telomerase to make the immortal life of Henrietta Lacks seem short in comparison.
The Winter Soldier would never age. Never grow old. Never die.
…But provided the right circumstances, he could be killed. And Barnes had done his damnedest. Bruce recognized—respected, even—that level of determination. Neither he nor Barnes had ever signed up for this…but even his own exposure had been an accident, not deliberate human experimentation.
Not torture.
Torture. That was the word. It felt more like torture than actual medicine. The body—the brain—what was left of Bucky Barnes wanted to die. And Bruce wasn’t letting him.
“Tell me,” Steve grunted instead. “Tell me.”
“He’s so dehydrated my only option was to go through his tibia (Bruce thought getting the rotor-saw through the super-soldier’s bone would be a challenge. The jelly he’d found instead had been nauseating.) and I’ve been running fluids subcutaneously and through an NG—his veins are so flat I can’t get a line, not even a central one. His liver and kidneys have failed to the point where I don’t even dare draw blood.” It was a strange sort of anemia and polycythemia, where his concentrated blood cell count was both simultaneously too high and too low. Where the slurry of near-solid blood in his veins was too thick, too viscous to bring meaningful nourishment to his suffocating, starving organs or pallid skin…yet too thin to clot. As they spoke, straw-colored serum continued to ooze from the leg, the nose, the bloodshot eyes, every sore on that grey, shrunken skin.
“It’s bad, Steve. He’s depleted every fat storage in his body, he’s breaking down muscle and bone. The rhabdomyolysis alone has already stopped his heart. Twice.”
Bruce blanched. Balked at the words. “He’s…he’s really sick, Cap. I need you to be okay with me saying he might not make it.”
“I’m not okay with that,” Steve shook his head—as if this were an argument, and he could win through sheer stubbornness alone (and, Bruce reminded himself, this was Captain America, The First Avenger, The Greatest Hero of The Greatest Generation, the man who’d single-handedly taken down HYDRA, survived 70 years in unmonitored cryostasis and walked away with a mild headache. If anyone in the history of humanity could win an argument with God, the cosmos, several billion years of human evolution, it would be him.)
[And if any man who ever lived deserved a miracle...well. Jesus was fiction and Gandhi was dead.]
“I will never be okay with that.”
“I’ll do what I can, Cap. But I can’t make any promises…and you shouldn’t either.”
“You’re going to be fine, Buck,” Steve Rogers choked. “You’re going to be just fine.”