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It's on the long, nerve-wracking trudge out from behind German lines, back to the Allied base that this weird big Steve promises is within a day's march, that the first hint of suspicion unfurls in Bucky's mind.
He puts one foot in front of the other but.
But part of him is still convinced he's trapped in a vivid hallucination, another drug-dream of impossibilities. It wouldn't be the first. And, really, what are the chances of this insanity being real? This is science fiction shit. That Hydra scuzzball had torn his face off and there had been a monster underneath. If that's not straight outta some Lovecraftian delirium, Bucky will eat a damn hat. Maybe he should've stuck to the classics like his Ma always told him.
That's not the only thing calling this demented little adventure into doubt though.
Because...because if New-Steve's real and right and it's already November 3rd...then he and the rest of their straggling band of misery, the whole sorry lot of them, have been prisoners of war for almost a fucking month.
And if that's true, from what he can figure, he was in that bastard Zola's lab for about two thirds of that. Three weeks, or thereabouts.
And that can't be. It—it just can't.
Not because he has shockingly few clear memories of the ordeal (though given his luck, it's probably been mere hours since the guards hauled his wretched ass down into Zola's underground hellhole). Nah, it stands to reason that his sense of the passage of time on the torture table was warped by the pain and the drugs and the fear, the fear. Bucky reckons he's allowed some forgetfulness—and he's glad of it.
He puts one foot in front of the other and.
And that's the thing, though. He's fucking walking. After that fucking table.
If this is—if New-Steve is real and really did let some crackpot inject him with a magical mystery juice (What the fucking fuck, Steve?) and then really did come and save him—then, then Bucky was confined to that godforsaken metal slab for over twenty days. Freezing, starved, strapped down twenty-four-seven. Yeah, he'd been hooked up to an IV but not allowed the barest dignity of freedom even to relieve his bladder in a pot. Hydra's faceless goons had just dumped buckets of icy water on him to rinse away the stink of urine, sweat, and blood.
War has taught him so much. God, what a moron he'd been when he signed those enlistment documents. If only he could go back in time and slap that naïve nincompoop silly. He'd been in college—he might've dodged the damn draft and ridden out this horror story from the sidelines, shamed but safe.
A beautiful what-if.
He hadn't done that. He'd chosen war. And war...more than anything, it's taught him the pathetic frailness of the human condition. The laughable upper limits of their measly endurance, the grisly ends that result from the most absurd of causes. Gangrene from an untreated blister. Bad water. Pneumonia. Stupidity.
Bucky's a soldier and goddamn sniper, one of the Army's best. He is intimately acquainted with the power of a tiny hole in just the right location. Headshots are great, but not required to kill a man after all is said and done. Oh no, one precise shot to any number of places will do the trick. Men die easy as Mama's apple pie.
He puts one foot in front of the other despite.
Despite the fact that men do not just get up and start walking across six-inch beams in the middle of a collapsing building after being prone for three weeks. Talk about science fiction, ha! Men are not able to carry a rifle and march for hours when they're coming down from powerful sedatives and dehydrated, when they haven't had a decent meal, or any kind of meal, in more than a month.
Men get bed sores and rashes and illnesses and infections. Men have muscles that atrophy and skin that scabs and scars after a scalpel peels it apart. And sure, Bucky is not exactly feeling his best right about now—he's hurting, hungry, tired—but he sure ain't laid out in the truck they stole to transport the dead and wounded.
And if this is real, he should be. He should be.
Unless.
Don't think it.
There were injections.
But there's not a puncture wound anywhere that he can find.
One foot. One foot in front of the other.
He puts one foot in front of the other and each breath strengthens him. He could do this all day.
Bucky stares at Steve's broad, unbent back and refuses to wonder.
END
Come talk to me about all things Bucky!