Chapter 6
They sat on the ground for a second, breathing hard. “Thanks,” Steve said finally.
Bucky didn’t answer.
Pain was radiating out from Steve’s foot, and partially to avoid looking at it, Steve looked at Bucky.
Bucky’s eyes were shut tight and he was taking deep, measured breaths. It almost looked like the meditation session Sam forced Steve to sit in on that one time at the VA.
Steve took out the emergency beacon and pressed the button several times. He sincerely hoped Tony’s over-enthusiasm in creating it meant it would still transmit information through at least a foot of solid metal.
“Bucky?”
Bucky seemingly ignored him, but Steve could tell he was listening.
“My team knows we’re here,” Steve said, in case Bucky was thinking through an extraction. “They have my location, they’ll come dig us out.”
Still no answer. Bucky continued breathing deeply.
Steve looked around the small vault. There was a large metal table in the middle with multiple reinforced straps hanging off the side. In the corner there was a metal cage with a chain attached to the wall, a single shackle on the end. There were dark stains on the ground and it didn’t take much to imagine what had happened in there. It was like a scene from a horror movie.
It was like Azzano.
“Bucky?” Steve said, a little timidly. “Are you ok?”
Bucky opened one eye and looked at him. Somehow he still managed to glare with only one eye open.
Steve shifted awkwardly and then winced at the pain shooting up his leg.
Bucky noticed, both eyes now open. “Broken?”
Steve looked at it. “Yeah,” he said, seeing how his foot was sticking out at an unnatural angle from his leg. “Nothing I haven’t dealt with before.”
Bucky frowned slightly. Steve took this display of emotion as a hopeful sign. Bucky stood up and started taking off his jacket.
“What are you—”
Beneath his jacket was just a blank tank top, and now Bucky took that off too.
Steve couldn’t help the gasp that escaped his lips when he saw Bucky’s bare chest. The metal arm went all the way up to his clavicle and where it connected with is skin there was an angry red scar that looked inflamed. Although his muscles were well-defined, so were his ribs, and his unnaturally pale skin seemed stretched over his torso.
Bucky caught him staring and reached across his body to grab his jacket and put it back on. Steve only caught a glimpse of his back, but he saw more scars.
“Bucky—”
“You heal fast?” Bucky interrupted.
“Um. Yeah.”
“Lie back against the wall.” Bucky started ripping his tank top into strips.
Steve scooched himself two feet until he was near the wall. “Why— oh. Are those for my foot?”
Bucky nodded, now placing the strips of fabric next to each other by Steve’s outstretched foot.
“You don’t have to—”
“Shut up and lie down, Steve.”
Steve’s eyes widened. He couldn’t count how many times he’d heard Bucky say that same thing growing up, always when Steve was too sick to go outside but not sick enough that he wanted to stay in bed. If he closed his eyes, he could’ve been right back there in that rickety tenement in Brooklyn.
Steve leaned back against the wall and Bucky rolled up the left leg of Steve’s pants, and then carefully removed his boot. For hands that had done so much violence, he was incredibly gentle.
Bucky studied the ankle for a moment. Steve looked too: it was already twice its normal size.
“It will heal wrong,” Bucky said.
Steve grimaced. “Yeah, you’re probably right.” After a mission with SHIELD, shortly after the aliens in New York, Steve had brushed off medical attention after a fight gone wrong. His wrist and two of his fingers had healed themselves but were crooked and twisted. Steve had to go back to SHIELD headquarters and the doctors had to re-break and re-set his bones. It hurt worse the second time around. “Can you set it?”
Bucky nodded.
Steve shut his eyes and balled his hands into fists. There was a sharp crack and pain coursed through Steve’s leg. Steve groaned and took a deep, steadying breath before opening his eyes again. His foot was pointing in the right direction and Bucky was already wrapping it in the makeshift bandages. “Thanks, Buck,” Steve murmured.
When Bucky finished wrapping his ankle, he took several steps back and then sat down against the vault door, perpendicular from Steve.
Steve thought he probably wanted his space, or maybe that he would start talking when he felt comfortable. But Steve had never been good at patience.
“How did you know about this room? Have you… been here before?”
Bucky shrugged. “Seems like it,” he said.
“What do you mean? You don’t remember?”
Bucky didn’t answer.
Steve let the quiet sit between them for another minute before he blurted out, “What do you remember?”
Again, Bucky didn’t answer. Although Steve could only see his profile, Bucky’s face looked like a mask—eyes blank, mouth still. It was like an approximation of how Bucky used to look when he was perched in his sniper’s nest for hours at a time, but with less life behind his eyes.
Steve kept his mouth shut and tried to think of what Sam would tell him to do. Give him space? Talk to him? Try to get him out of his shell? It was useless, Steve thought. He had tuned out too many of Sam’s self-care lectures, and anyway, he didn’t think any of them were particularly aimed at two long-separated best friends locked in a metal box where one of them had almost definitely been tortured.
When they were growing up, their roles had been reversed. Steve would be curled up on the threadbare mattress, too weak to do much else, and Bucky would tell him stories to distract him from the pain. Or later, after his ma passed and they were living on their own, every time Steve got canned from an odd job he’d managed to get, Bucky would pull him out of his own brooding head by putting a baseball game on the radio or dragging him out to the dance halls or the movies.
Bucky always knew what to say.
And now here he was, sitting only four feet away from Steve, and yet feeling like a million miles away. After so much time chasing him, yearning to find him and bring him home, Steve had no idea what he should say to him.
“When we were kids,” Steve started, “and I was stuck inside—not when I was really sick, but when the weather turned cold and I started to wheeze when I climbed the stairs and ma said I shouldn’t play outside on account of how I would get sick if I did—you always came and stayed with me.” Bucky didn’t react, and Steve kept going. He was self-aware enough to know that this was just as much for himself as it was for Bucky. “You stayed with me and you always made it fun, even when we could hear the other kids messing around outside. We’d reenact the last Dodgers game, or take turns playing with that spinning top you found that one day that we got yelled at after school for jabbing each other with the rulers and making a ruckus.
“And for a while I didn’t understand why. Why you would hang around with me, when you coulda been friends with anyone. You were the real deal, Buck, even as a little kid—smart enough to make grades but not so much that you’d be a teacher’s pet, athletic and coordinated, good looking. You even hit your growth spurt early, and when we got to the point that girls started getting interested in boys, everyone wanted to be with you. You musta taken out half the girls in Brooklyn on dates.
“But you spent time with me. You stayed even when the other kids decided the poor, skinny, Irish kid with a single mother needed a lesson about how the world worked, even when sticking by me put you in the crossfire.
“For so long I was scared I would do something wrong. That you would just wake up one day and decide I wasn’t worth it anymore.”
Bucky huffed a small breath of air. Steve’s heart was pounding.
“But you never did. You stuck with me when I was small, and then after I got big, you followed me back into a war you hated. You tried to hide it, but I know you hated it. And then—and then—”
Steve couldn’t keep going, his chest felt tight and tears leaked out of the corners of his eyes when he squeezed them shut.
But he needed to finish. He needed to get through this.
“And then I let you fall,” Steve said in a whisper. “You grabbed the shield to protect me, what you had been doing for my whole life, and they blew you out the side of the train and I let you fall.”
His whole body was shaking now and he refused to open his eyes.
“And then I never found you, I never even checked, I thought you—you were—and now here you are, and you’re still saving my life, and, and—”
Steve gasped like he was having an asthma attack again, like he couldn’t get enough oxygen into his lungs.
“Breathe,” Bucky said softly.
Steve opened his eyes and Bucky was kneeling next to him.
“Steve, just breathe. In for four, out for four, come on.”
Steve took few shaky breaths, trying to mimic Bucky’s steady breathing next to him.
“I’m sorry,” Steve whispered. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”
Bucky shook his head and shifted away from Steve, leaning against the corner wall. “You selfish bastard,” he muttered, still shaking his head. “You stupid dumbass.”
Steve wasn’t sure what was going on, but there was inflection in Bucky’s voice and he sounded more like his old self. Steve’s heart skipped a beat.
“You were always a fuckin’ martyr, weren’t you.”
“I—”
“Rogers,” Bucky barked, and Steve’s mouth snapped shut. “Maybe the world doesn’t revolve around you. Some things happen and there’s nothing you can do about it. You’re not responsible for—”
“I could’ve jumped, gone after you,” Steve said. “I should’ve—”
“Don’t you fucking say that,” Bucky snarled. He was angry, furious even, but Steve was overjoyed to see that emotion on his face. He wasn’t shutting down—this was Bucky’s anger, not the blank face of the Winter Soldier.
“It’s true,” Steve said simply. He wasn’t crying anymore, he felt oddly drained. “I wished I had.”
Bucky got up and went back to his position leaning against the vault door. He was quiet for a while, and Steve thought the conversation was over. He wasn’t sure if they’d gotten anywhere, but it still felt significant, somehow.
And then, “He never wanted that.”
“What?”
“Your Bucky. He never—he wanted you to live.”
Steve sat there, stunned. Bucky had to remember, that was a sign of him remembering, right? But what did the use of the third person mean, what was that a sign of?
“He always wanted you to live,” Bucky murmured.