Chapter Text
Steve woke, as he often did, to the faint sound of the neighbours arguing. When they really got going, she yelled in Italian, not that Steve could hear the individual words now. Just a man's voice and a woman's voice humming in his bad ear.
His good ear was smashed against the pillow as he curled on his left side in some small effort to breathe easier. He was freezing, deep in his bones. He groped blindly for a blanket, refusing to let light contribute to the pounding in his head, but the bed was bare.
Maybe he had kicked it off... He did that sometimes, in feverish fits.
Oh God, he could not be sick again... This winter had been bad enough already…
"Buck," he tried to call, but he could squeeze enough air out of his lungs for only a whisper.
He rolled onto his back so his meager voice would not just disappear against the wall. "Bucky..."
"How do I get this thing off!" the woman yelled.
"I dunno, Romanov! It's not like he asks me to zip up the back for him!"
"Well, this needs to come off now!"
"Oh yeah, the first aid scissors ought to do the trick. The material's only nearly bulletproof."
"Stark, I swear to God!"
"Captain Rogers' internal temperature is still thirty-two degrees,” said another voice, staticky and British. The radio… far away…
"Buck..."
"If you're not going to help me back here then at least fly this thing as fast as you fucking can!"
"What do you think I'm doing! You think I want to be responsible for Capsicle 2: Electric Boogaloo?"
Everything was loud. And everything hurt.
"Is there a setting on this glove that will cut open his suit but not... him?"
"What glove? Romanov, that's my—”
Whatever Natasha did—Natasha? Natasha did not belong in their apartment... Was he dreaming? And if he was, which part was the dream? His deafness and his asthma and this awful quivering feeling were so real...
Whatever Natasha did hurt like hell, straight down the right side of his body, from his wrist to his hip to his ankle.
"Hope you're not worried about your modesty, Rogers," Natasha murmured. That was just for him. And it was reassuring that she was not yelling anymore.
She peeled his split clothes over the right side of his body and wrestled his left arm out of a tight sleeve, finally managing to pull the last stitch of it off his ankle with a significant amount of swearing.
He found the blanket. Natasha had it and wrapped them tight together with it. Her body was small and hot against his, draped over his left side and vigorously rubbing her hand up and down his right arm.
"C'mon, Rogers."
He was trying... He was trying to figure out which part was the dream, which direction he should swim to get out. The water had been so cold, shocked the air out of his lungs and it still had not come back.
Because of the pneumonia? Because of the crash?
Natasha was smaller than him, so he was...
"Jesus, Rogers, warn a girl first," she said, and her voice was back to normal. Even better than that, low and teasing, despite the twitch that ran through her as he wrapped an arm around her. She was real, so...
"Sorry," he said, his voice hardly anything at all. He still had not opened his eyes. His head pounded hard enough with the senses available to him.
"That's okay," she said, and that was much too kind. That indicated more about the true state of him than anything he could feel in his body. "We'll get you warmed up. You stay with me, okay?"
"Not goin' anywhere..."
"No, no you're not. But now that I've got you talking, you have to keep talking to me, okay?"
"’kay... what do you want to talk about..."
"Anything, everything. Recite the catechism for all I care. Do you know it in Latin?"
His mind floated... sank... to the apartment, to church, to...
"Where's Bucky?"
"Banner and Barton got him on the other jet. Bruce was right on it when Barnes went down."
"Down?"
"We're getting you both to the hospital ASAP. You'll see him there, okay?"
His brain fixed on Bucky, and everything spiralled around that focal point. Brooklyn then, New York now, airplanes and quinjets, the war, the Avengers, Bucky strapped to a table, Bucky pinned under a girder—
Barnes went down... Bucky fell...
TAKE MY HAND!
"Rogers, I need you to calm down. You're in no state to freak out, okay? Barnes has an actual doctor on his side, which means you're stuck with me and Stark. I'm sorry to say this, but you have to be grateful for that."
He laughed and it hurt.
If Natasha said it was going to be okay, then maybe he could sleep, just for a—
"Steve! Hey! You still with me?"
"Everything hurts..."
"I'm sure it does, but if you fall asleep on me one more time, I'm getting Tony to come back here and naked-cuddle you."
"Whoa, whoa! Who's naked in the back of my jet and didn't invite me?"
"Steve, come on. Stay with me. You and I are going to drive our pilot crazy with our combined terrible singing, okay? Here we go. A long, long time ago--"
"In a galaxy far away," Steve joined in, even less capably than his usual (and rare) attempts at singing. "Naboo was under an attack…"
"I can't believe you're doing this to me while I'm trying to save your life," Tony protested. "Romanov, you're a menace for ever teaching him that."
Natasha kept pressing against him, kept rubbing his skin to warm him, sang louder and louder as they went on. Steve whispered alongside her, head pounding, lungs burning, skin too tight, muscles too tense, bones shaking.
"The eagle has landed!” Tony announced from the cockpit. “Or, I guess, the eagle's boyfriend has landed? They've got Barnes and we'll be coming in hot in about five minutes."
"Natasha..." Steve risked opening his eyes. He needed to see her face, to see her feelings.
She looked... her hair was not red—or, not quite anyway, just wrong enough. Everything about her was off and Steve frowned, closed his eyes again. He could not dissect her expression when everything about her hair and her skin and her eyes were wrong, faded somehow, monochromatic…
So this was the dream, right? And when he woke up, he would be in a rickety bed and Bucky would be handing him the blankets he had kicked to the floor. And maybe he would kiss Steve's forehead, for the fever. The fever that made him so chilled and pained.
"I'm sorry, Buck..."
"Steve? Steve! STEVE!"
The dream was fading, and now there was only darkness.
“Oh, thank God.”
As Steve’s eyes fluttered open, he half-expected to see his mother sitting at his bedside. The bleached smell of hospital sheets—it could have been from then or now. But it was not Sarah Rogers with a Bible or knitting or a twisted-up handkerchief in her lap who sat beside him. It was Natasha, bundled up in sweats and a hoodie with her legs tucked up in the chair with her.
Steve blinked hard once, twice, but whatever was odd about Natasha never went back to rights, and he was already too exhausted to blink so hard again.
“Think I should probably thank you first,” Steve said, swiftly discovering how hard it was to breathe.
Natasha smiled. “What are teammates for if they’re not going to get naked with you in the back of a jet?”
“What happened?”
He felt like he had thrown himself on a grenade for real this time, everything in his body at the wrong angle.
“We had a mission in the Barents Sea. A freight ship, remember?”
Steve was still so cold that his only prominent memory was hitting the arctic water.
“The plan was to split up, but things went sideways pretty fast. We tried to call you back when you insisted on going after Barnes, but you didn’t reply on the comms and we thought—”
“Bucky?” Steve’s mind grasped that single thought, tight and trembling.
“He collapsed,” Natasha said. “Bruce got to him right away, but couldn’t wake him up. They flew him here ahead of us and he’s in surgery.”
“Surgery where?”
Natasha took his hand and grasped it, firm and steady. “We’re in Oslo. There was no way either of you was going to make it back to New York.”
Steve felt like he was falling again, falling forever, trying to catch up with Bucky on the long, cold way down. “But the doctors… he needs—”
“We know,” Natasha said, her voice even. “We’re getting someone over from the Tower as fast as we can who knows his physiology, but he needed urgent care. Bruce is in the OR to advise as much as he can.”
As he eased back into his pillows, Steve felt only the barest amount of relief.
“Do you want to hear the rest of the story about how you went offline, failed to make the rendezvous, and sicced an Iron Man search party on yourself?”
“I’m sure I’ll hear it from Tony,” Steve said, losing the fight against the exhaustion pulling his eyes closed. “And I’ll be fine.”
“Steve, you drowned. I had to give you CPR, and even that might not have worked if Tony had gotten to you a minute later. You’re literally on humidified oxygen to warm your airways and get your body temp up because of near-fatal hypothermia,” Natasha said. “That was way too close of a call.”
“I already tried freezing to death, Natasha. It didn’t work.”
“And a good thing, too.”
Steve’s eyes had already fallen shut, but he felt Natasha lay a kiss over his eyebrow before he dropped back into sleep.
Sleep that achieved nothing as he was woken by a horrific scream. A scream he knew.
Steve already had his legs over the edge of the bed. He wrenched at the oxygen tubes that held him back, but there were hands on his, stopping him. Glancing up, he saw Howard easily seizing his wrists and urging him to lie back down.
The experiment had not worked… And if he could not join the army, then he could not go rescue Bucky from that table. He might never see Bucky again—
Steve started to cough against the tightness in his chest.
“There you go, Cap. Easy does it,” Tony—Tony—said, above him. “I don’t know what they’re giving you, but anything that’s making you this pliant must be good shit.”
“Bucky—!” More coughing, less breathing. The room spun and Steve found himself holding tight to Tony.
“It’s hard to keep you two under with what we have on hand, but we’re working on it, okay? I bet the anesthesiologist has him back down already.”
Lying down made everything worse, the pressure of a trapped cough building and building, the dizziness only getting worse. The weight on his chest was too much, too heavy to… and he could not breathe… Steve fought to push Tony aside, to sit up.
“Whoa, there, Cap. Okay, someone’s coming. Someone’s—”
There was an immense pressure on Steve’s chest, pressing ever harder. He gasped emptily and opened his eyes to see Bucky above him, knee crushing down onto his sternum. Hair short, in his quilted jacket and uniform, rifle slung over his shoulder. Lips blue, skin livid. Eyes white, opaque with death.
The Bucky of his nightmares after he came out of the ice. And in his own dreams, Steve was always small, so he was truly being pulverized by this weight on his chest, by the breaking of his heart.
“Take…my… hand…”
Steve wanted the ground beneath him to shatter, to set them both free. To let them fall, together…
There was more than a nasal cannula keeping him in bed the next time Steve woke up. He had a whole oxygen mask now, and there was something clipped tight to his finger along with an IV in the back of his hand. He felt as heavy as a rock, but at least he could breathe easier, and the room was still.
“Steve,” someone said in a tone of voice that suggested it was not the first time they had said it.
Steve turned his head so he could listen with his good ear and found Natasha standing at his bedside.
“I wanted to make sure you knew that Barnes was out of surgery,” Natasha said. “I’m going to sit with him and leave you here to look after Bruce, okay?”
Steve followed the way she cocked her head. Bruce was in the chair on the other side of his bed, covered with a measly hospital blanket and fast asleep.
“Tony was…” Steve’s voice was so weak it surprised him. He could barely hear himself, could barely feel the words rumbling in his chest.
“Tony is off bedside duty for now. He’s overcaffeinated and overstimulated with problem-solving, just the way he likes it, so he’s pacing somewhere.”
“Bucky?”
“He’s in his own recovery room right now, Steve. They… they had to remove the arm, and he needs some special monitoring to make sure that that doesn’t have any adverse effects. And you need to stay here and keep resting, okay?”
Exhausted and bone-sore, even Steve could not bring himself to argue with that.
“With the ongoing state of his lungs and his heart, I still cannot advise that he be transported as far as New York.”
Steve laughed a little, and it turned into a cough, so he could not say Brooklyn is New York. He waited for Bucky to snark back at the doctor, but Bucky’s voice never came.
Bucky always came when he was in the hospital, and he had been here for days now…
Opening his eyes, Steve was met with three frowning faces at the foot of the bed. Natasha, Tony, and the doctor had stopped talking.
“How are you feeling, Captain Rogers?” the doctor asked in a lightly accented voice.
“Something about my lungs and my heart?” Steve said, too tired to put humour in his voice. Exhausted, really, but at least he was not in pain. “I didn’t mean to run, doc, but… I know, with the cold and all, but I was gonna…”
“Steve,” Natasha said, coming to the bedside and taking his hand. “Do you know where you are?”
“’m in the hospital… the asthma… but it’s—”
“Asthma?” the doctor said. “Are you saying you feel like you’re having an asthma attack, Captain Rogers?”
Steve nodded. He started to feel dizzy again and gripped Natasha’s hand. “Gets bad in the winter, the cold…”
“If what we’re looking at is asthma and other previous chronic conditions, this changes protocols a bit.” The doctor’s voice from the end of the bed sounded very far away. “Both of them must stay. We will work with your specialists when they get here.”
“Did Bucky bring me here? Can I see him?”
Natasha lifted Steve’s hand and kissed it. “You can see him in a little bit, okay?”
“M’kay,” Steve sighed.