Holding on to You

When Steve first laid eyes on Bucky outside the factory, after the explosions and the firefight and every horrible moment that had come before, all he could feel was relief. As they’d left the burning ruins in their wake, Steve had taken in Bucky’s face — grimy and hollow and wide-eyed, intermittently glowing in the light of the distant explosions. In that odd half-light, Bucky standing warm and safe and whole beside him felt like a dream, too perfect to be real, and Steve was half-afraid with every grueling step back to safety that he might jar himself back to reality and find himself alone again with no train of weary soldiers following him home. No trace of Bucky marching by his side.

It was almost too easy to imagine that aloneness, especially with Bucky looking so pale and keeping so uncharacteristically quiet as he walked in step with Steve. Far from his usual affect, Bucky now seemed shaky and unsure, shrinking with every step they took away from the factory. Steve couldn’t shake the feeling that Bucky’s presence with him was fragile, temporary — like he’d turn to his right and find Bucky gone again, faded into the air.

“How’re you holding up?” Steve asked him quietly, once the silence had grown so heavy it felt overbearing. It had been a year since they’d seen each other, months since they’d last even exchanged letters, and here Steve was, tall and nearly unrecognizable; he was burning with things to talk to Bucky about, and it was hard to believe that Bucky didn’t feel the same.

Bucky only grunted in response. He had his eyes fixed on the ground in front of him like keeping focused on that patch of dirt was the only way to make sure it stayed beneath him. Steve noticed a tremor in his fingers, one he was clearly fighting to keep from spreading all the way up his arms. His gaunt face looked paler than it had in the sickly green light of the HYDRA laboratory Steve had just pulled him out of. Steve frowned. 

“Hey, do you need a minute? We can stop —”

“No.” It was the first word Steve had heard Bucky speak since they’d been shouting to each other in desperation across the factory. Bucky’s voice was thin, laced with unmistakable tension.

“You sure? There’s nothing wrong with stopping to rest —”

For hours, Steve held onto a naive hope that putting distance between them and HYDRA might draw some of the old, familiar Bucky back out again, but instead he was forced to acknowledge the longer they marched, the worse Bucky looked. 

As night bled into morning, Bucky’s breathing was growing labored. Steve listened as he sucked in deep but shaky breaths, too measured to have been natural. He was sweating more than he should have been in the frigid winter morning, but somehow he was also shivering. He’d started hunching over himself more and more as he walked, and by the time it was fully bright outside he was slumped over so far he seemed almost bent double. One of his hands had crept back up to loop around his stomach, trembling where it gripped a fistful of his sweater.

“Bucky,” Steve said when the obvious pain he was in got too difficult to keep watching. Bucky didn’t answer, just kept walking in those too-controlled steps and forcing in another too-calculated breath.

Steve felt frustration starting to boil over, wondering only distantly if this was how Bucky had felt every time Steve had gotten into something over his head and still stubbornly refused to turn back. 

“Bucky. Just stop for a second.”

Steve drew his own steps to a halt, to the confusion of the soldiers following immediately behind him. Steve didn’t care about that anymore; all he wanted was for Bucky to acknowledge him, whatever it took. But Bucky just kept his head down, kept plodding forward. His face was ghostly white. Steve could see lines of pain standing out in sharp relief all across it.

“ Buck —”

Steve cut himself off as Bucky stumbled to a halt, swaying forward so hard that Steve thought he was about to pass out cold in the dirt. Instead Bucky caught himself with his hands braced on his knees, finally forced to stop.

Steve waved for the men following him to continue moving forward. They obeyed with only a moment’s hesitation, their own exhaustion weighing them down too much for them to spare Steve much of a second glance. Steve waited next to Bucky, watching for a moment as he stayed braced against his knees, panting open-mouthed over the frozen dirt. 

“Hey,” Steve said softly. “Talk to me. Tell me what’s going on.”

Bucky didn’t look at him. He kept his head down, breathing raggedly for so long that Steve wasn’t sure he was going to answer him. He spat in the dirt, back muscles twitching like he was about to start retching, but he seemed to fight it down just in time.

“Sorry,” he finally said, and Steve was struck again by how weak he sounded, weaker than he had even when he’d still been laid out like a half-dissected specimen in the lab. “I just… my stomach… h-hurts.” As he said it he finally glanced up, looking Steve in the eyes for the first time since they’d left the factory. There was something almost guilty in his gaze, and Steve felt himself softening. 

“Okay. I’m sorry.” Steve mentally kicked himself. Of course Bucky was having such a hard time. He was just sick, understandably so, and probably just wanted to be left in peace without Steve calling attention to how bad he felt. “It won’t be long ‘til we’re back at camp. Do you think you can hold on until then?”

Bucky tensed his jaw. Steve wasn’t sure if he was considering his answer or fighting to keep from throwing up.

“Mhmm,” Bucky finally managed. His throat bobbed suspiciously, and Steve had a feeling that if he’d opened his mouth to answer, a lot more than words would have come flowing out. Bucky spat another copious mouthful of saliva into the dirt, then straightened again, swaying a little as he found his way upright. Steve’s chest tightened watching him struggle, but he shoved the feeling down. He had bigger things to worry about right now than Bucky feeling nauseous. 

“Okay,” Steve said, offering a friendly pat on the shoulder. “You’ve got it, Buck. We’re nearly there.” 

Bucky nodded, seemingly resolved once again to avoid looking him in the eye, and Steve forced himself to let it go. He’d get Bucky all the help he needed once they were out of enemy territory and safely back at camp. For now, Steve had a mission to lead. 

Steve still couldn’t help wishing, with every step through the woods and back to safety, that there was something more he could do.

Their return to camp in the late hours of that afternoon was a rush of celebration. Separated from the other returning soldiers in the crowd, Steve let himself bask in it for a little while; after so long of being put down and overlooked, the knowledge that he’d finally done something good let him feel like he almost deserved to enjoy all the fawning in the aftermath.

Then suddenly he was being hounded by Colonel Phillips and a train of other officers, wanting to know exactly what he’d been thinking and how the hell he’d managed to pull it off, and Steve remembered why he’d done it all in the first place.

“I’ll sit down with you, I promise,” he assured the colonel, whose face was going red with anger, or maybe the humiliation of being disobeyed again by someone with no right whatsoever to be doing so. “I just — there’s someone I gotta check up on. My friend. He was there, in rough shape, and I just — I gotta make sure he’s okay. Please.”

Colonel Phillips looked like he wanted to argue, but at the glint of resolve in Steve’s eyes he backed down at the last second. Steve knew he’d won before the colonel even spoke.

“Fine. But I want you in my tent at 1900 hours. No more exceptions.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Steve had lost sight of Bucky in the throng of people rushing out to greet them, and he had a feeling Bucky had probably been feeling too sick to hang around in that crowd any longer than he had to. Steve set off through the dense encampment of tents to look for him. He didn’t get far before he noticed the silhouette of someone sitting hunched over on the ground nearby, just outside the tent that constituted the barracks. Steve glanced over his shoulder at the soldiers still celebrating at the entrance of the camp to make sure he wasn’t followed before heading over.

As he’d suspected, the hunched silhouette belonged to Bucky. His face was obscured where it hung between his knees, which were drawn up to his chest, but Steve would still know the shape of him anywhere.

“Hey, Buck,” Steve said, sinking into a crouch beside him. “Still feeling bad?” He looked around for a sign that Bucky had gotten physically sick, but the ground between his parted knees was clean. Steve’s frown deepened. He’d thought Bucky was just overwhelmingly nauseous, an after-effect of consuming tainted water or food scraps back at the factory, or maybe of whatever those HYDRA scientists had been doing to him, but if that were the case Steve would have expected him to have thrown up and gotten it over with by now.

“Uh-huh.” Bucky’s belated answer was little more than an inhale. He forced his head up from between his knees, blinking confusedly at Steve like he hadn’t expected to see him there. The hint of delirium kicked Steve’s concern up a notch. He moved closer, instinctively half-raising a hand to hover over Bucky’s forehead, and winced when he felt the unmistakable heat of a fever radiating off him.

“Do you know what happened?” Steve asked. “Have you been sick, or are you hurt, or…?”

Bucky huffed. Steve knew him well enough to tell that he’d be rolling his eyes if he had the energy. “Fucking… all of that, yeah. But this is… this is different. God, my s-stomach…” Bucky tipped forward again, burying his head between his knees. 

“Okay,” Steve murmured, trying to keep his worry at bay. He’d been sick enough in his life to know that bad nausea could feel all-consuming like that, making it impossible to even think about anything else. Surely that was all this was. “Why don’t you go lie down, get some rest while you wait for it to pass? I can make sure you’re marked down as present and accounted for, keep you from getting into trouble.”

Steve cracked a half-smile, waiting for Bucky to tell him that he was sure Steve would do all the getting into trouble for the both of them, but Bucky just swallowed hard, swaying as he pulled his head out of his knees again. 

“Don’t think I’ve got a bed here anymore,” he said, letting out a shaky laugh. Steve’s chest twisted with sympathy. That explained why Bucky had stopped short of the barracks, opting to curl around his aching stomach in the mud outside instead. 

“Right. Right, I’m sorry. The infirmary, then —”

“No.” Bucky spoke with more resolve than Steve would have thought him capable of in his current state. He fixed Steve with an awful wide-eyed look, one Steve had seen the faces of the men in the crowd at his failed USO show days earlier, in the gaunt faces of the soldiers staring out at him from between the bars of HYDRA’s cages. It hadn’t affected him quite so much before, not until it was Bucky. 

After a long moment, Bucky blinked, returning to himself a little. “Just… not the infirmary. Please.”

Steve craned his neck over his shoulder, eyeing the colonel’s tent in the distance as he weighed his options. He knew he was expected to report back any minute now, but he hated the idea of leaving Bucky like this, shivering on the ground and clearly ill. He considered going to find an officer or maybe a nurse to check on Bucky, maybe to find him an empty cot and force him to get some rest while Steve attended his meeting, but in the end he couldn’t do it. 

Bucky was sighing out a quiet groan, dragging one of his hands over his abdomen, no longer caring that Steve was watching as he gently pressed at the starved concavity of his stomach in an attempt to find some relief. His face screwed up in a wince and Steve thought for a moment that his glassy eyes might start leaking tears, but Bucky bit his lip and seemed to hold them back.

“Okay,” Steve said, making his mind up all at once. If he was late for his meeting, so be it. This was more important than any punishment Colonel Phillips could conceive. “Well, I’ve actually got my own space. A separate tent, over by the stage for the USO show. Long story,” he said to Bucky’s halfhearted questioning look. “Why don’t you come lay down there, just ‘til I’m done getting chewed out by Phillips. Then maybe you’ll be feeling better, and we can get you your own bed reassigned here in the barracks. Sound good?”

Sweat was beading on Bucky’s forehead again. “Y-yeah,” he stammered, like he was hurting too much to argue. “Okay.”

“Alright.” Steve smothered another tide of worry as he rose to his feet. “Think you can stand?”

Bucky tried, but couldn’t make it without bending over his stomach. He grimaced and cried out, breath coming in quick gasps.

“Okay. You’re okay. Here, let me help you.” Steve offered his hands, and Bucky took them. As their fingers wound together, Steve could feel the ridges of Bucky’s calluses, the shape of his steady hands and delicate fingers, and Steve swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry. He forced himself to focus on the unsettling heat leaching through Bucky’s skin and the slight shake in his fingers and tried not to think about how momentous it would otherwise feel to be holding those hands.

Steve hunched his shoulders a little to let Bucky swing an arm around them. Bucky kept his other hand clenched around his midsection, still clutching at his stomach, as he stumbled along towards Steve’s tent.

With Steve’s face only inches from Bucky’s, he was overwhelmed with the familiar smell of him. Part of it was masked with the stench all soldiers started reeking of out in the field, body odor and gunpowder and smoke, but beneath all that was something so essentially Bucky, and Steve wasn’t sure if his enhanced senses were to blame or if he always would have sensed it. If he’d always known Bucky so intimately.

“Alright. Here we go.” Steve forced himself out of that dangerous spiral of thought as he ushered Bucky into his tent. It was far smaller than the barracks, far smaller than the sleeping quarters afforded to the USO girls; there wasn’t space for much besides a cot, set up low to the ground and mounded with blankets, and a trunk of Steve’s belongings at the end of the bed.

Bucky didn’t seem to be taking in much of his surroundings, too focused on keeping hold of his stomach. His glassy eyes were screwed half-shut with the effort of walking. Steve had to guide him all the way to the edge of the cot, laying him down as gently as possible on the taut canvas. Bucky gulped at his change of elevation, his face blanching with a sickly pallor, but after a moment the nausea seemed to subside. Steve watched as Bucky curled in on himself, drawing his booted feet up to his chest to huddle in a fetal position.

“Are you gonna be okay for a little bit?” Steve asked, feeling powerless as he watched the shallow rise and fall of Bucky’s chest. “I gotta… Phillips wants me to debrief, and…” Steve gestured vaguely at the flap of his tent.

Bucky grunted. “‘S fine, Stevie. Jus’ go.”

The slur in his voice made Steve’s heart thrum with worry. But Bucky said he was fine, and if Steve didn’t make this meeting, he’d doubtless be sent far away from here — away from Bucky — as fast as possible. 

“Okay. I’ll — I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Steve promised. He paused to pull the bundle of blankets from his cot over Bucky’s body, dragging them up to rest with the hems tucked just beneath Bucky’s chin. 

It felt more intimate than Steve had meant it to, and the tiny space of the tent was starting to feel even smaller. Even as Steve brushed past the tent flap and back into the open air, he felt his cheeks burning. 

Things were like this with Bucky sometimes; the air between them got so strangely charged, and even back when they’d both been living ordinary lives, it had felt like they were hovering on the precipice of — something. Steve had never quite dared to look down, to let himself come to terms what that something was. Now, together again, it was starting to feel inevitable. Like they were going to fall into that something, no matter what.

Steve very carefully didn’t let himself think about it. He straightened his back and headed to Phillips’s tent and tried not to worry about Bucky—or that inexorable feeling of falling—anymore.

Steve’s meeting with the colonel dragged on longer than he’d expected it to. He was stuck delivering explanations and analyzing maps and schematics until long after night had fallen outside the canvas walls of the tent. 

He’d known there was a possibility he’d be court martialed on the spot, but Steve had picked up on something appraising and almost proud in the colonel’s eyes when he’d first returned to camp, and it turned out he’d read that look correctly. Phillips had a new assignment for him here, in the Army, and expected him to report back the next day to hear the details. Steve left his tent glowing with excitement, unable to wait to tell Bucky all about how the recklessness Bucky had disapproved of so much had finally paid off.

When he ducked back into his tent, though, Steve realized he wouldn’t be telling Bucky anything of the sort.

“Bucky?” Steve called as he entered. The lump of blankets piled on the cot didn’t respond. 

“Hey. Buck?” Steve tried again. He crouched beside the cot with his heart suddenly jumping in his throat, using trembling fingers to peel away layers of blankets one by one. The heat radiating off of the tight cocoon only grew stronger as Steve went. When he finally uncovered Bucky’s shoulder, he gripped it and felt the heat of an unmistakable, blazing fever.

“Oh, jeez. Buck?” Steve jostled Bucky’s shoulder a little, and Bucky’s head lolled lifelessly with the motion. Steve was half a second away from screaming for help when Bucky finally moved. Groaning, he squirmed under Steve’s hand and his eyes fluttered open. 

“Hey. What’s going on?” Steve hoped his tone wasn’t as panicked as he felt.

Bucky squinted at Steve, trying to focus. His hair was dark with sweat, falling over his forehead in curls the way it always did when it was wet. His shirt was similarly dark at the armpits and neckline where more sweat had begun seeping through the thick fabric. His face was drawn in a tight, sour expression that clearly meant pain.

Bucky’s mouth opened and closed for a moment, searching for words just out of reach. “...Stevie,” he finally managed, the strain in his voice evident even in that single word.

“Yeah. I’m here. What’s wrong?”

Bucky frowned, considering for a moment. “Sick,” he finally ground out. “Hurts.”

He was sounding increasingly less coherent, a soft slur coloring his words. It did nothing for Steve’s rabbiting heart, still lodged in his throat.

“I know you don’t want to go see a medic,” Steve began tentatively. “But can I at least call a nurse, have her look you over…?”

Minimally responsive as he was, Bucky still had an answer to that. He breathed out a sound of clear disagreement, though it morphed into a whimper halfway out of his mouth. 

“Okay, okay. You’re burning up though, Buck. We’ve got to at least try to get your temperature down.”

Bucky only seemed open to that suggestion because he was so opposed to the alternative. He let Steve pull the blankets away from his body but frowned as it happened, jaw clenched against his chattering teeth.

The change in temperature didn’t seem to help. Bucky writhed on the cot, chasing relief he couldn’t seem to find. 

“Ow, ” he groaned, the word becoming long and drawn-out as it left his mouth. Steve swallowed against a sudden lump in his throat. Something about that simple, childlike protestation reminded him of being sick as a kid in New York, buried under a mountain of blankets with his mother’s warm hands on his forehead. It was a far cry from where Bucky was now, shivering where he lay curled up around his stomach on a bare cot just inches above the cold, wet mud. 

“You’re really hurting bad, huh?” Steve asked, helpless as Bucky trembled, drawing his knees in tighter to his chest like shielding his stomach might bring it some relief. 

Bucky tried to draw in a breath and hiccupped instead. “Fuck. Y-yeah.” Steve watched as Bucky’s face grew even paler under the fevered blush of his cheeks. Bucky hiccupped again, his whole body jolting with the movement. He jerked one of his shaking hands up to cover his mouth, the other winding its way back around his stomach. 

“Okay.” Steve didn’t have to ask in order to know where this was going. “Just hang on, Buck. You’re doing good.” Steve hurriedly glanced around his tent, trying to find something that might serve as a bucket. “Just hold on. One second…”

Bucky twitched, spluttering, clearly trying to hold back the inevitable heaving of his stomach. Steve leapt to his feet to dig through the trunk at the end of his cot, but he’d already come to the sinking realization that he wasn’t going to find anything. He’d made Bucky hold back for nothing.

“I’m so sorry, Bucky,” Steve said, just as Bucky lost the fight with himself and hiccupped again. This time, fluid spurted out of his nose and mouth as he went.

With that heave, Bucky seemed to fully lose control. He heaved again, bringing up a pitiful mouthful of bile-tinged vomit. His stomach and diaphragm kept moving in tandem, spasming in little hiccuping heaves that brought up the meager contents of his stomach mouthful by painful mouthful. 

Bucky had managed to maneuver his head to hang over the edge of the cot so that most of his sick splattered into the dirt below. Bucky still cringed as it hit the ground. 

“Sorry,” he squeaked when he had a moment to pause for breath. The end of the word was lost in a spasming dry heave. “C-couldn’t stop –”

“It’s alright,” Steve tried to soothe him. He reached a tentative hand to Bucky’s face, using his thumb to wipe sweat and snot out of Bucky’s stubble. His eyes had started to leak tears from the pain of vomiting. “You needed to get it up. It’s okay.”

Bucky keened, watery eyes squeezing shut. Steve’s hand stilled where it was wiping traces of mess from Bucky’s face.

“Did that — did throwing up help? Does it hurt any less?” Steve asked. He knew from experience that sometimes just getting the offending substance out of his stomach made him feel better when he was sick. Judging by the persistent grimace on Bucky’s face, he had a feeling that might not be the case now.

“No,” Bucky groaned, confirming Steve’s fears. He was sweating faster than Steve could wipe him clean. His face was glistening with it, his shirt soaked all the way through. His breath was coming in shallow, panting gasps. “God, it hurts — so fucking bad — Steve —”

“Okay, okay.” Steve couldn’t hide his panic anymore. It was clear that something was really wrong, something Steve wouldn’t be able to fix with cold compresses and soothing words. “Where does it hurt?”

Bucky drew in a trembling breath. “Was… here,” he mumbled, pointing to the center of his abdomen. “Got better for a sec, but now it's here. Really bad,” he croaked, his hand drifting lower and to the right. “And, just, everywhere —”

“Alright. You’re okay, Buck.” Steve’s heart was pounding. This sounded familiar. He remembered that list of symptoms from his mother’s nursing stories. He knew he had to get Bucky to a doctor, and soon. Still, he tried his best to keep sounding nonchalant. “ It’s gonna be okay. I think, really quick, we just need to go see the medic —”

“No,” Bucky gasped. “Not the doctors, Steve. Please —” Bucky grimaced, the hand around his stomach clenching into a shaking fist in the fabric of his shirt. His head tipped back as his whole body writhed in agony. 

“Not the doctors,” Steve repeated, uncomprehending. “Just a medic, Buck. I need them to look at you, to make sure you’re okay —”

“No,” Bucky sobbed, but as his face continued to pale, his body curling weakly in on itself in a way that reminded Steve uncomfortably of a dying animal, Steve decided he had no choice. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, kneeling to slot his arms under Bucky’s bent knees and the curve of his back. “I just - I have to. Just hang on a little longer for me, Buck.”

Steve lifted Bucky as gently as he could, holding him to his chest as he ducked out of his tent and hurried through the darkened camp. Bucky’s head lolled forward onto Steve’s chest as he walked. The unsettling heat from his forehead burned even more intensely than it had when Steve had first laid him down in his tent. Bucky was sending up little whimpers on every exhale and shoving at Steve’s chest with the last reserves of his strength, the only protestation he could manage about his situation.

“No… no, no…”

 Steve shushed him, feeling guilty and awful as he did it.

“Shh, I know. I’m so sorry,” he murmured. “I’m so sorry. We just — we have to do this.”

They’d nearly reached the opening of the medical tent, green with a large red cross emblazoned on it, when Bucky’s body started to tense up in Steve's arms. Steve looked down, terrified, only to see Bucky’s face going green again, something bobbing suspiciously in his throat. 

“You’re okay,” Steve said. “Get it up if you need to. It’s alright.”

Something guilty flashed in Bucky’s eyes, but he obediently let his mouth hang open. His body jerked forward, and Steve could feel the muscles of Bucky’s back squeezing as he held him. Nothing came up besides a dry heave and a strangled groan. 

“Okay. It’s alright, Buck.” Steve kept rattling off the string of meaningless comforts as he hurried the last couple of steps toward the medical tent. “You’re gonna be just fine. You’ll see.” 

“No…”

Steve took one last look at Bucky’s glassy eyes, barely visible under his sagging eyelids, and realized he had no idea whether he was telling the truth.

Things happened fast after that. Steve hovered at the mouth of the tent, his pleas to the medics to help him, I don’t know what’s wrong, but hurry, please still ringing in his ears. He listened from outside as the treating medic’s muted voice mingled with Bucky’s, delirious and barely audible, listened as the doctor started conducting an examination and did something that made Bucky scream. Watched helplessly as he was shoved back from the opening of the tent to make room for Bucky’s limp body on a stretcher to be loaded into one of the Jeeps that ferried wounded men back and forth from the army hospital a few towns over.

Only as the car disappeared from sight did time begin to slow again, and Steve stood there reeling in the aftermath.

How had things gotten so bad? How hadn’t he noticed?

Was Bucky scared, alone and in pain and about to be laid out like a specimen in a lab all over again?

“You’re Steve, right? Steve Rogers?”
Steve turned to find one of the medics standing at the opening of the tent.

“Yeah,” Steve managed. “That’s me.”

“You brought him in?” The medic nodded toward where the Jeep had been before it had rushed away.

“Yeah. What’s…?”

“He’s going for antibiotics, maybe surgery. Think he might have a burst appendix. He said he was experimented on, right? Showed me those marks all over his arms and said he had a tube put down his throat… plus, all the guys coming back from that factory said it was filthy there. Lord knows what kinda infection he coulda picked up in those conditions.”

Steve closed his eyes, feeling shame wash over him. He hadn’t known the half of that. He hadn’t asked. And now Bucky was…

“Can I see him?” he asked. The medic gave him a strange look. 

“Not really up to me, pal. I’m sure someone here’ll get word of his condition eventually.”

So Steve turned back to head to his tent, defeated, alone again. 

And all he could think was that they’d been so close. He’d held Bucky in his arms, thought somehow that things were going to be okay again. It had all fallen away so quickly, like trying to hold water in cupped hands.

He was desperate still, even now that there was nothing more he could possibly do, and he swore he could almost feel himself falling. That feeling he always got around Bucky, like he was teetering on the edge of a deep chasm and afraid of tipping over the edge, was gone. He was plummeting now, and he was starting to think he had an idea of what he might be falling towards.

Never again, Steve swore. If he could just get Bucky back one more time, he’d stop being afraid of all that falling, stop being afraid of keeping Bucky too close. He’d never let him go again. 

Steve worried without reprieve until he caught sight of Bucky three days later walking back into camp. He’d hounded the medics and Phillips and anyone who would listen for information about Bucky’s condition (and considered storming the hospital like it was a HYDRA base when nobody had been able to give him any news,) but he hadn’t even known Bucky was alive until he happened to glimpse him walking on shaky legs away from a newly arrived Jeep just outside the medical tent.

“Bucky.” Steve rushed over to him, and it felt like a dream, half-thinking he was walking towards a ghost. Bucky still looked too fragile, carrying the weight of everything he’d been through in his sagging posture, and Steve couldn’t shake the irrational fear that he would crumble to dust under his hands if he reached out for him.

Bucky turned when Steve called him, but didn’t move towards him. He fixed him with an inscrutable look underlined by the dark circles beneath his eyes. 

“Bucky. You’re alive. ” Steve half-reached out to him, but thought better of it. Bucky had been stripped of the sweater he’d been wearing and was now clad in a plain army-issue undershirt. Steve could see bandages around his torso through the thin fabric. 

“I’m so sorry.” The words left Steve in a rush. “I know you didn’t want to see the doctors, and I took you there anyway, and I just — I’m so sorry, Bucky. What happened?”

“‘S okay,” Bucky finally said. His voice was rough. He was still giving Steve that unreadable, unsmiling look. “I wasn’t really thinking straight.” His affect was so flat that Steve had no idea whether he was lying. “Doctors said my appendix burst. Had to have surgery for it. Should’ve been dead already when I got there, but…”

Steve tried not to visibly flinch at that. 

“Still,” Steve said once it was clear Bucky wasn’t going to finish. “I’m so sorry. I wish there’d been anything else I could’ve done.”

Bucky shook his head. He looked exhausted, ready to keel over any second. Still, he said, “Y’know, I guess we should talk.”

It was a stark reminder of the serum and the army and all the things that had gone unsaid between them, but Steve’s heart was rising in careful hope that at least Bucky still wanted something to do with him, after everything. “I guess we should,” he said. “I’ve got some time. Can I… can I help you back to my tent? You’re dead on your feet, Buck. You need to sit down.”

Bucky huffed. “Sound just like all those doctors.”

That association scared Steve for a second, but a small smile on Bucky’s face let him know he hadn’t meant it.

As they walked, Bucky pressed his shoulder to Steve’s, practically leaning on him for support. Bucky wasn’t so fragile as Steve kept imagining him to be, he realized. He was solid and warm and safe now, and he’d beaten the odds more times than anyone should have been able to. 

He was resilient — they both were — and Steve could tell him about the serum. He could talk about his new project with the army. He could figure out how to tell Bucky about how scared he’d been to let him go, how he’d never let it happen again. And with the way Bucky was leaning on him now, he was sure he wasn’t alone in that feeling.

He may have still felt like he was falling, with little idea where he was going to land, but there was comfort in knowing he wasn’t the only one.