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When Bucky came home one cold, hazy day from working down at the New Brooklyn Interplanetary Spacecraft Landing Station, he didn’t offer Steve one of his playfully dramatic, over-the-top kisses on the cheek. That was when Steve knew that something was wrong. So when his other half too-casually placed the relocation papers on the kitchen counter, it was more a confirmation than a realization. It still hurt.“It’s okay, Stevie,” Bucky said placatingly, probably because even Steve could feel the storm clouds brewing on his face. “It’s only for a year or two, and space travel has gotten so much faster in the past two years alone. I’ll be back before you get the chance to miss me.”“I just don’t see why I can’t go and help too. They keep saying they need every living body they can get.”He spoke a little too vehemently, which triggered a coughing fit that interrupted his long-familiar tirade.Bucky patted his back soothingly.“That right there is why you can’t go, and you know it. Your immune system’s shit, Stevie.”“So?” He tilted his chin up defiantly. “I’ll just wear a mask all the time.”“I wouldn’t be able to kiss you through a mask.” Bucky laughed, though a thin shade of something unhappy darkened his eyes. “What would be the point of my best guy coming with me if we can’t even sneak out to some alien space rock outside camp at night and give the other guys something to talk about?”Steve glared at nothing. “Then I guess we’d have to make do with just touch.”“Uh uh, Stevie, touch could get you infected too. You’d have to wear some sort of space suit all the time. It’d be like you were covered in bubble wrap. Say, that’s actually not a bad idea!”“Jerk. See if I touch you until we get back here.”“Steve. See reason. I’ll keep in contact with you, I’ll earn enough combat compensation money for us to move somewhere less crowded and grey, and we can continue on with our lives. I bet you wouldn’t get sick nearly as often if we lived somewhere where the air wasn’t full of chemicals.”Bucky’s eyes were warm and sincere, but even he couldn’t hide that little bit of despair behind those flowery promises. They both knew that any future return was far from assured.“You’re missing the point.” Steve bit out, turning away. The only thing worse than being thwarted by his own body yet again was seeing that darkness get comfortable in his partner’s eyes.“And what’s that?”
“You’re going to be out there fighting to liberate people, and I’m going to be stuck here on a backwater planet, doing nothing to help all those people who desperately need it! Every time we get any news at all from off-world, it’s always about how the Vielekopfe have taken another planet and are doing God-knows-what with the people there. They always say they want help, and I want to help. But they won’t have me.”Warm arms encircled him from behind. Light pressure on top of his head told him Bucky was kissing his hair.“Steve. I get it. Hydra are bastards and I don’t like hearing that they’ve taken another planet any more than the next guy. But you would just get sick and die. You would be throwing your life away. Find another cause. There’s always people hurting somewhere in the galaxy. Help them. Pick another battle.”“But this one’s important!” It felt like the fire in his chest was licking its way up his throat, parching and burning it so that the flames could almost be mistaken for dammed-up tears.“They’re all important, Stevie.” Bucky whispered tiredly. “Please. Don’t make this worse than it already is. We’ll get past this, and then things can go back to normal, alright?”The words what do you mean, worse than it already is? Fluttered up in his throat like butterflies, only to be squashed when he looked at the relocation papers again. They weren’t the same color as the ones Steve had tried to get. Bucky had not volunteered for this.He wilted in Bucky’s arms like a fire lily blighted with disease from some far off planet.“Okay. I’ll wait until tomorrow to be angry.”Another hair-kiss. “That’s all I ask.”Late that night, though, as they lay next to each other under cheap, too-thin blankets from New Brooklyn’s grey-skinned, nimble-fingered citizens of the nicknamed Spider District, Steve couldn’t let it go.“But what if you don’t make it back, huh? How is that supposed to be any better?”“Because I actually stand a chance, Steve. I work at the landing station, and I haven’t died yet. Heck, I’m immune or partially immune to most of what we’re likely to run into. I have a decent chance of making it back. You have no chance.”“There’s always another sickness.”“I know, Stevie. I know it’s selfish to prefer dying and leaving you alone over watching you die fighting for what you believed in, but I told you I was a selfish lover on our first proper date, so don’t say you weren’t warned well in advance.”Steve snorted. “That’s a lie, James Barnes. You call waiting on me hand and foot when I come down with everything in a three-planet radius selfish?” “Considering you probably got sick from me working at the number one place to get fresh new diseases? Yes.”“It’s not your fault we’re poor. Working at the station pays better than anything else and you know it.”Bucky pulled him closer to his chest, so he felt the light vibrations of his chuckle against his skin. Pressed up against him like this, every breath Bucky took rocked him slightly; the gentle inflation and deflation of his lungs was enough to move his frail body. A tiny flame of frustrated anger flickered, but guttered and blew out with Bucky’s next breath. Laying together like this with the heat of their blood diffusing through the long, unbroken line of skin contact, it was almost like they were a single, unseparated body. His own respiratory system was fooled well enough to actually behave like it should, and the scent of Bucky’s extra-strength lilac-scented soap was so thick and heavy in his nose that he couldn’t even make out the chemical sterilizer that still clung to the blankets even though they’d bought them long ago. It was difficult to stay angry when his senses were being assaulted with Bucky and peace. It was okay. He’d be angry again tomorrow.“Let’s not talk about work right now,” Bucky murmured into his hair. His chest vibrated against Steve’s chest, but so lightly that he had to concentrate to really feel it. It wouldn’t have been possible if they had been wearing shirts.“Okay.”He pushed against Bucky. Not enough to actually move him, or even to disturb the blankets wrapped around the two of them like a joint shroud. Just enough to feel the increased pressure of Bucky’s skin against his.“Where will they send you?”“Azzan O-1. It could be so much worse, Stevie. It’s supposed to be pretty warm.”“Wasn’t that one of the ones Italy colonized?”Bucky paused. Steve couldn’t see his face, but he imagined he was biting his lip and looking up at the ceiling the way he did when he tried to remember something.“Nah, I think it was colonized by a colony of Italy.”Steve huffed and shifted so Bucky could feel the way he shrugged his shoulders without having to move away.“Do they still speak Italian?”“No idea.”The slime pools were, on paper, an industrial dumping ground for nontoxic biodegradable byproducts of tezzi plant processing. In reality, it was a place for those bored with the usual community dances and unwilling to pay the obscene entrance fees for the dance clubs perched on top of New Brooklyn’s skyscrapers like stars on top of bryolstone-and-titanium christmas trees.The slime pits fertilized the swaths of the Whiteleaf Forests that jutted up against New Brooklyn’s city limits, so that the enormous pits, which had been dug over three hundred years ago, now had enormous whiteleaf trees growing from the soil underneath their glowing, electric blue surface. The blue light bounced off the paper-white leaves, creating an artist’s wonderland of light and shadow. He’d drawn Bucky here several times over the years, though never when there were too many people around. Lit like this, he looked like something out of a fairytale. Even better, the strange angles and blue tint hid the sickly pallor of his skin well enough that by the end of the night, Bucky sometimes seemed to forget that he was frail at all.Steve pulled Bucky through the throngs of people crowding the bridges and platforms build around the trees so people could chat and dance and drink above the glowing blue light of the pits. It wasn’t usually this crowded; but perhaps Steve should have expected it. Bucky couldn’t be the only one to have gotten drafted.Their usual spot was taken up by a group of chatting, grey skinned girls still wearing their work clothes - one of them even had a pair of seamstress’ sewing scissors sticking out of her pocket - so they continued on through twisting bridges, up rope ladders and, at one point, actually climbed down one of the trees the platforms were built around to get to a lower set. Music from different platforms wove together, creating a blanket of unintelligible, impenetrable sound. It didn’t ever seem to get softer or louder, so Steve was forced to set off in a random direction and hope. Only Bucky’s fingers laced with his kept him from throwing up his hands in frustration.It took some shuffling and pushing, and at one point swinging over the rails of the bridge and climbing down the tree itself, but eventually they managed to reach a bridge that wasn’t groaning under the weight of dancers and partiers. It was midwinter, so the slime levels weren’t as high as during the biannual spring and autumn harvests, but it was still plenty high. The bridge hung only scant inches above the surface.Steve knelt and rolled up his pants, then swung his legs into the warm slime. He raised his eyebrows pointedly at Bucky.“Come on, Buck, it’s nice and toasty.”“You just want me to have to show up at the Drafted Personnel Relocation Office tonight with blue skin.” He said it with a grin, and quickly bared his legs so he could dangle them in. “Well joke’s on you, Stevie. Your legs are gonna be stained way longer than mine.”“Uh uh. I’m gonna be able to scrub it every night with proper fora soap, but you’re gonna have to use that antibacterial stuff. Everyone knows it doesn’t work on stains worth a damn.”Bucky punched him lightly on the shoulder.“You should be using anti-bacterial too, you know. It may not work so great for making stuff pretty again, but if anything nasty was even thinking of being on your skin, it would kill it before you could say ipinelitis.” “I caught that one time, you jerk.”“You were the only one on the whole planet who caught it Stevie. You were in quarantine for about a hundred years.”Steve rolled his eyes at the blatant exaggeration.“Don’t be so dramatic, it was only two months.”“When I can’t see you or even talk to you without a screen between us? Might as well be a hundred years.” Bucky smiled and pressed a snake strike-quick kiss to his partially deaf ear. The legacy of a contagious spore-based ear infection from back during their elementary school days.“You sap. I’m still gonna get clean before you do.”“Alright then, I’ll just keep it the entire time I’ll away. I’ll still be blue when I come back, and we can take a bath together and you can clean me up properly. Whatever soap you like, even.” He wrapped his arm around Steve, and Steve leaned into it. Bucky was warmer than the slime, but not by much.“I’ll get blue soap, just to annoy you.”“You would.”They sat in silence for a moment, just listening to the frenzied music blaring from speakers on the platforms above them like the magnified heartbeat of a scared animal. The heat of the slime, of Bucky’s body next to his, of his own anger at everything in general and being unable to fight alongside Bucky twisted and twined with each other until Steve felt like he had a fever.It just wasn’t right. Hydra was causing deaths and destruction everywhere they went. For now, the news stories all came with the comfort that it was happening in some other galaxy, that the danger hadn’t come to their corner of the universe. But the images of cities whose water supplies had been bombed, the videos with thirsty blue and brown haired children in the background with cuts and scrapes and bandages, all covered in tell-tale signs of infection, the sinister reports of the sorts of horrors that happened in areas that surrendered to Hydra rather than deal with the devastation dealt to those who opposed them- it all stayed with him. Each one was another log on the bonfire burning in his chest.He wanted to fight.He wanted to take that fire in his belly and make it the fever that burned away Hydra’s disease from the world.He had an idea.Before he could lose his nerve, he shoved Bucky just a hair harder than he normally would. All of a sudden he was surrounded by the tangy smell of the slime, and Bucky was sputtering and treading with his legs to keep himself afloat while he wiped slime from his eyes.“Eck, Steve! It’s the middle of winter! We’re gonna have to walk back in the cold and we’re gonna be wet, what kinda dumb idea was that? You’re gonna catch a chill, and then before I’m even gone you’re gonna be sneezing up a storm.”Steve swam over to the bridge, but didn’t try to climb out just yet. Instead, he used it to hold himself above the surface so he wouldn’t have to swim. He couldn’t exercise and talk at the same time.”“Sorry Buck. Didn’t realize how much force I was putting behind it.” He tried to sound innocent, but it was hard when he could feel how unapologetic and unsurprised his features were.“You are such a liar, Stevie.”“Guess I’ll just have to ride the bus to the Relocation Office with you. Buses are heated, right? No chance of catching a cold. Besides, this way I can see you off properly.”Bucky looked unimpressed.“You couldn’t be more transparent if you tried, Steve.”“Are you going to stop me?”Bucky looked like he sure wanted to, but after a few seconds he mumbled out a no. “If they accept you, then it’s your choice, and not mine.”At the Office, after he and Bucky said their goodbyes and his lover was bustled off to get his assignment details, Steve filled out the enlistment forms as quickly as he could, hoping his eagerness would make them spend less time scrutinizing him.No such luck.“And are you immunocompromised?” asked the man sitting at the medical paperwork desk. Steve had tried to breeze right past, but one of the officers standing guard at the door had turned him back with explicit instructions to get a health history certificate from the desk before he continued on.“No,” he said, and wrapped an arm around his chest to disguise the way his chest convulsed with his suppressed cough.The man eyed him dubiously.“Could I have your medical transfer number, please? All prospective recruits must submit a copy of their history with illness and the vaccine record, or allow it to be requested.Steve rattled off his number, changing the last digit. Maybe if the request failed to go through, they’d just wave him on while they sorted the problem out.The man squinted at the screen, every once in a while tapping a key or hitting the back button. After two minutes of silence, Steve tried to slip off to one side but the man grumbled a frustrated ‘just wait a minute, your number’s not going through. What’s your name?”“Steve Rogers,” he said reluctantly. He wanted so much to give a fake name, but if he did that then he’d be caught out for sure. It would be just his luck if he made up a name and it happened to belong to someone else in the system. One look at the photograph would be all the uniformed man needed to call him on his lie.“Ah, I see. You messed up the last digit. It’s a six, not a seven.”“My mistake,” Steve muttered.“I’ll just print this off and highlight any vaccines you might need to get a booster shot for, and then you can be on your way.”The large office printer behind the desk whirred to life, and the thin, tightly-packed printing paper began to slide into the belly of the machine. The light mechanical swooshes of each line being printed began.And didn’t stop.Steve’s face turned redder and redder until he was the color of the special heritage tomatoes imported for exorbitant prices from Earth as the printer kept whirring and whirring. The extended printing tray filled dipped lower and lower under the ever-increasing weight of the paper, until it shook a little with each new paper the printer deposited on top of the stack. The desk man raised an incredulous eyebrow at him.After several minutes of steady printing, the top inch or so of the pile slid off the tray and fluttered to the floor. Still the printer continued to whir.At long last, the printer ground to a halt. It emitted several insistent beeps, and the screen flashed insistently. The man rolled his chair over to look, and clearly struggled not to laugh when he read the message on the screen.“Out of paper! Well, that’s definitely a first. Here, why don’t we just have a look at what we have so far…”Only sheer stubbornness kept Steve standing there while the man looked through a few random, out-of-order pages worth of hospital stays, illnesses, and diagnoses for a full twenty minutes before finally handing Steve not the approved health history certificate but a medical exemption certificate.He stood there, face red and weak with dejection, and wondered if he could steal the proper form while the man was distracted by the mess of papers all over the floor. He flicked his eyes up from the medical exemption to peek at the desk. The certificates were there, in plain sight and neatly stacked, name line left blank. It would be so simple to just slip one into his pocket.At that moment a hand descended on his shoulder.Steve jumped, convinced for a split second that someone had heard his thoughts. But when he whirled around, a kindly looking, older gentleman with four eyes was standing there, already holding his hands up in apology. He looked like an immigrant from one of the neighboring planets, but Steve couldn’t be sure just from looking at him.“Sorry there, didn’t mean to startle you.”“It’s alright,” Steve said. “I was just leaving anyway.” He waved the medical exemption form like a flag of surrender. He was definitely setting it on fire when he got back to his and Bucky’s apartment.“You seem upset.”“Of course I am,” Steve said, perhaps a little too forcefully. “What Hydra’s doing, using bioweapons on innocent people- it’s horrible, it’s wrong, and I want to help put a stop to it. But I guess I’m too sickly.” The words were so bitter they nearly burned his tongue.The man peered at him, like he was trying to determine Steve’s every personality trait from his facial features.“I just couldn’t help but notice that a rather large medical file just came through the request system,” the man said at last. “I’ve been keeping an eye on it, you see. The military has a special program, of sorts, but they need volunteers with a history of illness and medical issues, and most of the people that walk in here to sign up don’t have quite what we’re looking for.”The man, whose name was Dr. Erskine, took him to his office and gave him a full recruitment speech, but he needn’t have bothered. Steve was already onboard.The room was cold enough to make Steve’s lips turn blue and so stiff that they trembled like dying leaves in the autumn wind when he tried to speak, but the palm trees and tropical flowers were thriving. A patch of bird-of-paradise plants grew flush up against the ice-covered wall, and tiny icicles grew like hairs from an enormous hibiscus flower. A butterfly rested delicately on one of the blooms. As Steve watched, it fluttered its lightly-frosted wings.“As you can see, Mr. Rogers,” Dr. Erskine said, “we’ve successfully adapted the treatment to a variety of organisms. This environment would normally be quite hostile to plants like these.”“I’d say that’s an understatement, Sir,” Steve whispered in wonder. His shaking lips struggled to form the words, and he could see his breath.Mercifully, Dr. Erskine keyed in the code to open the door to another room. It hissed as it slowly slid open, and a burst of hot, humid air blew into his face like thick tezzi smoke. The abrupt temperature change shocked his system, and he felt his leg muscles wobble a bit. He tensed them defiantly and hoped he didn’t faint.This room was much bigger than the previous room, and did not contain any particularly eye-catching foliage. Instead, woolly mammoths and polar bears roamed around enclosed areas, carefully keeping their distance from one another. The tropical climate didn’t seem to bother them.“These are a just a few of the hostile environment test rooms, of course,” Erskine said. “Many of them are not safe to enter without equipment of some sort. The research team has done an excellent job testing the effects of the treatment in many environments approximating those on known alien planets. We wanted to test how far we could push the resilience of a wide variety of different cell types.”The next room contained row after row of clear, floor-to-ceiling pillars, each filled with liquid. It seemed to Steve like a forest of enormous test tubes. Inside each one, many-tentacled culufish floated. He was tempted to stop and stare; he’d heard they were a real problem as an intergalactic invasive species 40 years ago, but he’d never actually seen one outside of a book before. They’d brought a bunch of nasty diseases from their home planet that infected fish across the Gyrichtich Ocean on the other side of the planet, where most of the canned seafood sold in New Brooklyn originally came from.“We’ve created many different versions of the serum since we started working. Some increase strength, some increase temperature tolerance, some increase something else. We’re still working to understand how different experimental factors affect the end result, but those are small details. We’re perfectly positioned to move forward with the first sentient being testing stage.”He ushered Steve through a thick metal door to a smaller room filled with row after row of neatly labeled vials and shelves stuffed with containers. Everywhere he looked, another color was bottled up and waiting to be released.“The version that we will give you should boost your immune system to levels hitherto unrecorded in humanoid medicine. As a side effect, we can expect your cells to become quite a bit more resilient. Temperature changes probably won’t affect you as much, and you should heal faster, things like that. The most important thing, however, is that you won’t ever get sick again. You will be immune to everything.”He paused and looked gravely at Steve. Not one of his four eyes blinked.“On a more negative side, there is a not insignificant chance that your immune system will crash completely before accepting the serum, in which case we might need to replace some of your organs. In addition, in one in every two billion animal test subjects, the healing side effect developed into untreatable cancer. We won’t know how intense these side effects are until you’ve undergone the procedure, of course. I have attempted to prevent those outcomes, but there is only so much I can do for my first test subject.”“I understand,” Steve said. “I know there are risks. But my original plan was to sneak onto a spaceship and hope I didn’t die before I could do some good. These odds are much better than I could have hoped for.”Erskine nodded. “Alright then.” He gestured to a small memory foam cot towards the back of the room. “Let’s get started.”Steve sat down on the cot and mentally slapped himself every time he slipped up and thought about how coffin-like it was. He was not going to die here. If he got sick from one of those diseases they had bottled up so they could experiment on it, then he would get angry, so angry that the heat of it would bake the virus like a fever. If it was one of the ones that heat didn’t hurt, then he would set his heartbeat by the clock ticking in the corner and never lose time even once, and his heart would just keep beating while he waited out the sickness. And if his weak, unspaceworthy body failed him, then he would become a ghost and haunt their apartment until Bucky got home, or better yet, haunt the Spacecraft Landing Station until he could get onboard something headed for Azzan O-1, something headed for Bucky.Dr. Erskine sat down on a hovering chair. It shifted a little when he settled into place, adjusting itself so that he was directly across from Steve.“There are multiple cameras in this lab, and an intercom. Several other scientists are monitoring everything from a secure, uncontaminated lab elsewhere in this facility. In case of an accident, this lab will be quarantined if necessary.”He gestured at the vials. “Some of these hold serum components or past formulas, but a good portion of them are diseases we’ve already tested the serum against. You should have nothing to worry about from them, but just in case the others will not be joining us.”Steve nodded.Quarantine. He’d been in quarantine before. It had been a long time ago, and he’d had Bucky with him then, waiting on the other side of the glass, but it still loomed large and ominous in his memory. But this wouldn't be like that. They’d make sure nothing was wrong and then he’d be out. Easy-Peasy.He laid down, and Erskine strapped his arms into place.“The restrains are just a precaution. We can’t have you jerking around and possibly messing up the delivery.”Steve nodded and prepared for the needle.The first shot was just pressure and then nothing. The second stung, but no more than the many, many vaccines he’d gotten over the course of his life. The third didn’t hurt at all, but his vision started to swim as soon as the needle pulled out of his arm. The fourth was agony, making him whimper and bite his lip until blood began to trickle down his throat, forcing him to cough. The fifth was even worse. He was screaming by the sixth. The seventh made his vision go away, but the eighth brought it back, along with what he was pretty sure were hallucinations. Bucky hadn’t been in here with him before, had he? He shouldn’t be here, it was dangerous. He could get stuck in quarantine, and sick people were so much more likely to die in there.There was some reason why Bucky couldn’t be there, but he couldn’t quite remember what it was through the pain. Had he forced Bucky to promise he would stay outside the room? How had he managed to get that promise out of him?The ninth made his vision start reverting to normal, and after the tenth he remembered that Bucky had been drafted into their inter-galactic army to liberate nearby allies captured by HYDRA. After the eleventh, his thoughts were mostly clear.His eyes were closed, but he heard the arm restraints loosen and fall off his wrists loud and clear.He sat up, years spent in and out of the hospital keeping him from disturbing the various needles and medical supplies around and in him, and took a deep breath. There wasn’t so much as a hitch. He took another one. This time, his whole lungs filled with fresh air until they were like the straining sails of large, old sailing ships.Steve smiled at Dr. Erskine. Excitement flooded through him, lighting his blood on fire.“I think it worked.”A thrilled, anticipatory silence followed his words. He could practically hear the scientists on the other end of the PA system glowing with triumph.A sudden crash made every newly-invigorated nerve cell in Steve’s body leap like a frightened deer. Erskine turned towards the sound, and the world turned to broken-glass fragments.The glass front of the closest cabinet was shattered. Vials littered the ground. Light from one of Erskine’s machines reflected off the scattered pieces of glass, sending light bouncing around every which way. A man stood in the doorway, wavegun still raised. His skin was marbled yellow and red, and the hand wrapped around the gun only had three fingers. Dark green gas wafted like blown campfire smoke from one of the cracked vials. Something pink oozed out of another. Time was slow and thick as a bog, and Steve’s confused mind couldn’t wade through it fast enough.And then the marbled-skin man smiled and collapsed. A second after him, a second body hit the floor. Erskine. Time snapped back to normal and Steve leapt to his feet to heave him up off the floor. Green smoke wafted across both of their faces, and Steve’s heart stopped. He knew this disease on sight- it was famous for how quickly it killed. Every school covered the plagues of Green Demon’s Breath, the wretched engineered disease brought to Earth from a far off planet, and pictures of it formed part of the mosaic of ‘what history looked like’ in the minds of youths everywhere. Some part of Steve that was always thinking of Bucky screamed at having made it this far only to succumb to a disease that had already been eradicated.Erskine began to cough. His light-blue skin took on a greyish color. He looked up at Steve, and Steve waited for his vision to fade.He waited and waited as Erskine faded from heartbeat to heartbeat, as the light slipped from his eyes, and frantic voices spilled out from the lab intercoms.Nothing happened. The serum had worked.Azzan O-1 wasn’t all that far away from Azzaye. They were both colonized by the Italians (or were they colonized by one of Italy’s other colonies? It didn’t matter), and it was only about a day’s travel by spaceship to get from one to the other. Less if you took a fancy military ship. So when Howard Stark, one of the other scientists on the project, told him that a bioweapon had been released on Tamarre, a city on one of the southern continents of Azzaye, and that they needed someone who wouldn’t fall ill to the diseases Hydra had released to help evacuate the city to various treatment and quarantine camps on Azzaye’s various moons, rescue those in need of medical treatment, and search areas too affected to send normal rescue workers to, he was interested.When he heard that several squadrons, including Bucky’s, had been brought from Azzan O-1 to those same moons after being hit by a similar weapon, he had no choice but to go.There was a whirlwind of preparations to be made- he was emergency-promoted to Captain, given a dozen different briefings on the Hydra situation on Azzaye and the neighboring planets, Howard introduced him rapid-fire to the agents he would be working with- but within the week Steve was climbing aboard a military spaceship and preparing for lift off.Azzaye’s moon was barren and grey and the change in gravity was difficult on Steve’s weak, long-unused muscles, but he barely registered any of that. The army hospital almost seemed to blaze with light, casting everything else in shadow. Everything else could wait.He broke into an awkward run. Every step he took carried him five or six feet up and twice as far, but he could only really control the speed of the first half of each leap with any accuracy. It was like he was running in a dream, and each step was far too slow for how hard he was pushing off the ground. It frustrated him to no end.He misjudged the last step and ended up having to throw his hands out to avoid hitting the little window over the door of the administration building face-first. He sank back down to the ground, then stepped more carefully through the door to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling.A harried group of secretaries sat in the entrance with large-screen tablets. Their fingernails clicked against the screens as they scrolled through names as quickly as possible. A small queue had formed, and Steve took his place in it. His heart raced in his chest in time to the rapid nail clicking and his face felt as though it was glowing, like he was the one who was sick instead of Bucky.It seemed to take forever for the line to move, though every time he glanced at the clock he was reminded that not even a full five minutes had passed since he’d float-walked through the door. The world seemed to be moving too slowly to keep up with him, which was unfortunate because Bucky was part of that slow world. He tried to ground himself. No matter how fast his thoughts and his pulse raced, it would take the same amount of time to get to Bucky.His body wasn’t very receptive to this logic.When at last he reached the front of the line, he said ‘Barnes, Bucky Barnes’ so fast, the secretary misheard him and lost precious seconds trying to find a ‘Bucky Parmes’ in her files. Once Steve said the name again, more clearly this time, she sent him to Ward D, Unit 3, Room 27.Room 27 was shared between six patients, of which Bucky was the only one not flushed like someone had spilled powdered blush all over him. His hair was sweaty, like the other five, but he was deathly pale. A sign on the door read ’Highly Contagious-No Visitors.’ A smaller sign beneath it read ‘Doctors must use full-cover face masks and skin protection in this area.’He opened the door and slid inside.Two of the other patients tracked him as he came in, but Bucky didn’t so much as glance up until Steve was already kneeling at his bedside.“Stevie?” He whispered. “Is that you?”“Yeah, Buck, it’s me.” He ran the back of his hand over Bucky’s forehead. It chilled him to touch, like that time years ago when Bucky had had to work during a snowstorm and lost his gloves in the driving wind. His touch had been so cold that evening, Steve had leaped away from him the first time those trembling fingers brushed against his face.“What are you doing here?” Bucky murmured. His voice was weak and breathy, like his throat didn’t have the strength to engage his vocal cords properly. “The doc said the hallucinations were over.”“I’m not a hallucination, Bucky, I’m really here. I’m here to help fight Hydra.”Bucky made a strangled noise.“My mind must really be going, cause that’s the worst thing I’ve heard all day. What is my brain thinking, imagining you here? You can’t be here, you’d get sick the second you stepped off the ship. And you definitely can’t be in here. The only doctors they send in here are the ones already dying of something else.”Steve’s heart stopped. His hands shook against Bucky’s hairline.“What do you mean, the ones that are already dying?”“Well, they gotta get samples for their research somehow,” Bucky slurred. “But until they can do something about it, they can’t waste people on us when there’s thousands of soldiers dying of something treatable. Not to mention all those civilians.” He took a long, labored breath that rattled wetly in his throat. “But they’re not heartless. They don’t want to abandon us, so don’t make that face, hallucination-Stevie. They send in the doctors that are already sick with something incurable, all covered in hoods and masks, anti-cell-exchange everything and anti-bacterial everything so they can’t spread anything to the lab staff. It’s hard to tell they’re even human under all the stuff they wear. They do what they can to cool us down or heat us up, and then they take a bunch of samples to bring to the lab.”Steve’s hands trembled as he brushed Bucky’s sweat-soaked, dirty hair behind his ears.“You talk like they’re not going to find a cure in time.”“They’re not.” Bucky’s eyes slid closed for a few seconds, then opened slowly. “There used to be double this many of us in here. We were all sick with something else, before. We started getting better, at first, but then one day the doc comes and says we got a secondary infection while our immune system was compromised. Said it wasn’t familiar, but they should be able to treat it. That was a lot of dead bodies ago, Stevie, and they don’t even try and lie anymore. They don’t know what it is or how to fight it. The only thing they can do is try and stop the fevers and chills. That’s what’s really killing us. Five of the others died after their fevers went so high their brains fried in their skulls. The other guy’s body temperature dropped too low and something important froze. They come in cycles. First a fever, then the chills, then a worse fever, then worse chills, until one or the other kills you.”He blinked sloth-slow again, and focused on a blinking green-tinted light fixture on the ceiling behind Steve.“Huh. That usually makes the visions go away for a while.”“I’m not a hallucination, I’m here Bucky. They gave me some experimental vaccine serum, back in New Brooklyn. I’m not getting sick anytime soon, no matter what you have.”Bucky’s eyes widened, and something a little more lucid cut through the haze in his eyes. “Stevie?”Steve threw his arms around him and hugged him as best he could. He still wasn’t strong enough to lift him up, so he couldn’t really get his hands under him properly, and the cold touch of his skin still made him flinch a bit, but it felt like the right thing to do. Or maybe it was the only thing to do.“Yeah, it’s really me.” He pressed a feather-light kiss to his pale cheek. “You’re going to be okay, you’ve gotta be okay. They’re studying it in the lab, right? They’ll find something soon.”Bucky went rigid in his arms.“Stevie, you’ve gotta go. Get out of here. Find a decontamination room and lock yourself inside for a while.”“Not without you.”“Stevie, you don’t get it. I’m contagious. You’ll get sick, and you’ll get everybody else sick. You’ve got to go.” His skin began to heat up under Steve’s touch, but his eyes didn’t get any clearer. His breathing stuttered, and his left hand trembled weakly.“Didn’t you hear the part where I can’t get sick anymore?”“What do you mean?” Horror and hope warred in Bucky’s eyes. Steve laid a hand on his cheek and he flinched.“I signed up for an experimental program-“Bucky groaned, and this time it clearly had nothing to do with his internal temperature.“Oh god, Stevie, I turn my back for two minutes and you’re off volunteering to be a guinea pig! Jesus, why didn’t I see this coming?”“-an experimental program to test a new sort of super vaccine. It makes you immune to everything, bumps your immune system so high nothing can take it down or slip around it. It worked, Buck. You don’t have to worry about me getting sick ever again.”“Did you even wait until I was off-planet, or was the ink on your signature already dry when we took off?”Steve smiled innocently, and Bucky broke out in laughter.“Only you, Stevie, only you.”“Well, no one else with the necessary medical history had volunteered,” Steve huffed.“And why do you think that is?”He shoved Bucky’s shoulder playfully.
“Listen, I’ve gotta go soon. I’m supposed to be here to help out in Tamarre, since I can’t get sick. But I just had to come check up on you. I’ll be back later, and when I’m back you have to tell me everything. What Azzan O-1 was like, what you did, how you got sick, everything. Deal?”“Deal.”When Steve stepped off the ship on Azzaye, the first thing he noticed was the smell. The whole landing area smelled like death and smoke. He almost took a step back from the strength of it. Then he shook his head and kept moving forward. There were people here who needed his help.The smell grew even stronger as soon as he stepped out into the fields that separated the landing docks from the city of Tamarre proper. Unlike New Brooklyn, Tamarre didn’t allow any interstellar craft of any sort to land within city limits to make quarantines easier. Based on the reports he’d read on the way here, their stricter quarantine policies hadn’t helped them much.The fields themselves were in ruins. The violet, tezzi-like plants lay heavy with spoiling grain, and a herd of some sort of antlered, large-snouted animal Steve had never seen before was roaming around, eating their fill. Lines of trampled stalks clearly marked their meandering path. In the distance, he thought he could see several gas mask-wearing firefighters trying to put out a blaze. In the distance, great streams of smoke ran upwards from the general direction of the city towards an ocean of grey in the sky. The normal road through the fields was barricaded, and even if it hadn’t been there were too many cars and crowds of scared-looking people on foot to pass that way. Uniformed soldiers stood at the barricade, checking each person who went through for signs of illness.A new road had been cleared through the fields that ran parallel to the other road, and was lined with armed personnel. Their weapons, meter-long glowing staves that occasionally crackled with power, were pointed outwards, toward the people fleeing the city. Steve frowned.One of the agents accompanying him put a hand on his shoulder, drawing his attention away. They were wearing a plague mask as well, so he couldn’t really see their face, but Steve thought they were trying to be reassuring.“Don’t worry about the refugees, Captain. If they’re strong enough to flee, they’ll be allowed to leave. They just don’t want aid missions mobbed by people begging to be taken with them when they leave. It’s already happened once.”“If they’re all going to be evacuated, then why-”“There was a rumor that someone with one of the more contagious plagues had managed to slip past the Quarantine Office and was trying to leave with the uninfected population. It caused a brief panic, but a few people were seriously injured. No one wants a repeat performance.”Steve felt his lips tighten in frustration.“What does the Quarantine Office do that would make someone try and run from them?”“Nothing, really. They’re just not evacuating anyone with a confirmed contagious illness anymore, not even to the quarantine colony on their nearest moon. Too much of a contagion risk, they say.”“Let’s get going,” another masked agent broke in. “Every minute we spend here chatting is another minute wasted.”Steve nodded jerkily, and set off down the new, freshly-cut road through the violet grain. Now that he was closer, he recognized them as a genetically altered cousin of tezzi. Both grains had been modified from the same mother species a long time ago to make them more suitable to the planets they were brought to. If he remembered correctly, the genes that made this version resistant to the higher concentration of copper in the soil on Azzaye also made it become very dry right after the grain matured, and it had to be cut down and tended to in the off-season to prevent fires from breaking out. No wonder the air smelled like smoke- no one had cut down anything but the path they were currently walking on.Every once in a while, they passed a body lying along the side of their path, still holding a scythe or shovel.“They were volunteers,” the same agent as before assured Steve. “They knew they were going to die, and they chose to die clearing another road to the ship docks.”It didn’t make it any easier to see.The city itself was in chaos.There wasn’t much physical destruction, but armed police lined the streets, aggressively hustling people along to their locations. A large ring of them stood around a hospital, riot shields up, holding back a group of about three hundred people carrying lighters and cans of lighter fluid. Groups of hungry-looking children ran from them, and the officers didn’t bother to give chase, as far as Steve could tell, so long as they weren’t carrying anything obviously stolen and weren’t sporting any obvious wounds or marks of illness. One such group of children approached them, thin and sickly looking but not sporting the facial rashes Steve had been warned to be on the look-out for. Whatever they were sick with, it probably wasn’t from the bioweapon Hydra had dropped. It was hard for him to tell with their orange skin, though. One of the police officers stepped in and shooed the children away before Steve could ask any questions.The agents escorting him didn’t say anything. They just urged him on towards the eastern Vistacolina district.It took what felt like hours, but once they reached the edge of the district, which was helpfully marked by a barricade and a mob of police officers and scientists in plague masks, Steve almost wished the journey had been longer. Behind him, those terrified people scurrying around like rats before the twitchy police force, the hungry kids, the people in the blocked off hospitals - those were people he could help. There was still hope for them, and as sad as it made him, seeing them reminded him of the importance of this mission. Once he crossed that barricade, there wouldn’t be any more reminders like that.One of the police officers waved him over towards a small gap in the barricade. He offered Steve a mask, but Steve just shook his head and climbed through the hole in the barricade.The change was immediate. On the Vistacolina side, there were no police officers or people scurrying around. The buildings were dark and soot-stained, like the whole area had suffered a series of minor fires. The street was covered in soot and debris, and when the breeze picked up it blew ash into Steve’s face, forcing him to squint his eyes. There weren’t any people at all.Actually, that wasn’t quite true. After about a block he started to see the bodies, tucked away in alleys or visible through the windows of the lower apartment windows. Sometimes there were piles of bodies, all charred beyond recognition. Sometimes there were just piles of ash with clothes in them. Steve hurried past them.His heart beat began to subtly increase as he walked through the empty city district. Every time he took a step, it echoed slightly in the oppressive silence. The hairs on the back of his neck were halfway raised, but every time he turned around he was still alone with the dead.He walked on.It seemed like all of the color had been drained from the district. What wasn’t covered in ash and soot felt faded somehow. Smoke hung heavy in the air, heavy enough that within a few blocks Steve was hacking and coughing hard enough to slow his progress, and even the attention-grabbing quarantine notice signs seemed to have had the life and urgency drained from them.This was part of what made finding the weapon so easy- it glowed bright blue. The second he rounded the corner and saw the ruined City Transport Bus Center, he knew he’d found the place. Blue light shone softly through the broken windows, beckoning him like a signal flare.He had to pick his way carefully over the broken glass and around the abandoned buses, but once he got inside the way was relatively clear. The station had clearly been built with plenty of space for people to wait for large intercity buses to take them further east across the continent. Even with all the fire damage and the debris littering the floor, the space was still easy to pick his way across.The Cube sat in a crater in the floor, probably made from the impact it made when it fell from Hydra’s bomber. There was a hole in the roof above it, letting in whatever weak sunlight could filter through the haze of smoke from the burning of the dead that covered the whole neighborhood.And right next to it, whirring and beeping quietly, was a dog-sized robot of some sort.Steve cautiously stepped closer, trying to get a better look.Two circular areas where its eyes should be lit up as Steve approached, and the robot leaped to it’s mechanical feet. It’s mouth unhinged, revealing three rows of knife-sharp “teeth.” It lunged before Steve could move, knocking him to the ground and forcing the air from his lungs. A second later sharp pain surged through him. It had bitten his shoulder, and he could feel blood pouring from the wound. The robot loosened it’s jaw and then bit down again, widening the stab wounds and causing more blood to gush around its teeth. Steve gritted his teeth to hold back an agonized moan, and tried to bat at it with the arm that wasn’t pinned under it’s metal belly. It didn’t seem to be working.There was an energy blaster on his hip, but he couldn’t reach it, and even if he could he hadn’t used it before. He also had a shield built into his arm guards, but to release it he needed to press a small button on one side, and he didn’t have the hands to spare to try and feel for it.Pain clouded his senses. He was warm and cold at the same time- his fingers and toes cold as they got after the shock of sticking them in icy water for a second, his neck so hot he felt like he was wearing those oversized scarves Bucky bought for him last winter. Everything was cloudy, except the driving need to keep fighting the thing on top of him. He kicked and thrashed instinctively, which probably made the wound worse. He punched and swatted as hard as he could, which didn’t seem to phase the robot at all.Fear seared through him. He couldn’t get this thing off. He was losing blood too fast, and his strength was waning with it. He was going to die here, immune to whatever effects the bioweapon had, only to die within three feet of it, unable to complete his mission. Desperation lent him a surge of strength, but it just wasn’t enough. No matter how hard his limbs kicked and pushed, the robot didn’t give an inch.Then, something slipped inside his left arm guard and everything suddenly stopped.The robot froze in place, jaws partway loosened. It’s determined stance turned to dead weight on top of Steve’s rib cage, and after a few deep, less painful breaths it slid off and to his side. He forced himself to turn his head and look at it.It was splattered with blood from his struggles, but he could clearly see where the edge of his arm guard shield was still lodged in its side. He must have hit the deploy button on the side of the robot in his flailing.He reached up and felt around his shoulder. There was a lot of blood, and it made his searching fingers slip as they felt around for the wounds themselves. He was in danger of bleeding out if he didn’t return fast.With a herculean effort, he heaved himself to his knees, then to his feet. He lifted the glowing cube, which was much lighter than it should be, and cradled it against his chest. Then he staggered outside and began his walk back to the barricade.When he reached the barricade, the realization that he couldn’t walk out into a crowd of police and agents with a bioweapon like this pierced his foggy thoughts. Someone else might touch it, and then they’d have a whole new wave of illness on their hands. He came to a halt next to the barricade and leaned against it for support. His legs were shaking, and his footing was unsure. The bleeding was slowing down, but the damage was already done. He wouldn’t be able to stand at all much longer.“Hello?” He shouted. “It’s me, Steve Rogers. I found the bioweapon, but I sustained wounds in the process of retrieving it. I need assistance transporting it to the base.”Several seconds slipped past in silence before he got a reply.“Message received, Captain Rogers. What can you tell us about the weapon?”“It’s a cube of some sort. It glows blue, and it’s really light, but it left a dent in the ground where it was dropped. I would have thought something this light would bounce or break rather than make a crater.” His voice began to rasp towards the end. His tongue felt dull and inflexible.There was another tense pause.“You’re sure it’s actually emitting light, Captain?”“That’s how I found it. It was lighting up the windows of the bus station.”The next pause was longer. Steve’s vision started to glitter around the edges.“Thank you, Captain. A containment team is on their way ASAP. Our lovely scientists on this side have some concerns about your description, and have advised that we take certain precautions. Can you hold on for another few minutes.It wasn’t really a matter of could or couldn’t. Either Steve hung on, or he passed out and died from blood loss and they had to send a drone or something to collect it from his dead body. Or maybe they couldn’t. Hadn’t one of the agents told him the smoke was messing with their drones?\“Yes sir,” he said. He wasn’t sure if they heard him.Slowly, his legs began to give out. He sank by inches down the wall until finally his legs’ strength deserted him all at once and he collapsed onto the ashy ground. The cube spilled from his hands and hit the ground with a light thud. He tried to pick it back up, but his arms had turned into noodles and his fingers wouldn’t move the way he wanted them too.This close to the barricade, he could hear scared chatter and alarms blaring in the distance. He was glad- if he had been left alone in the silence of Vistacolina’s dead, he might have started to panic.At last, when his vision had gone as fuzzy as his thoughts and his entire uniform felt like it was stuck to his skin with blood, there was a scraping sound. He lifted his head from where it rested against the wall to look.A large, metal box had been pushed through the same hole in the barricade he’d entered through. It was open on top, revealing a space inside several times the volume of the cube.“Captain Rogers, are you still with us?”“Yes sir,” he said as loud as he could.“Could you say that again, Captain Rogers, we can’t hear you.”He tried again, but his throat didn’t want to cooperate. Everything felt awful, in a fading sort of way. He didn’t have very long before he laid down and wouldn’t be able to get up again.Summoning the last of his strength, he crawled towards the box. He kept one hand wrapped around the cube, and crawled on his other. He left a trail of blood behind him and his wet hands quickly turned black as the ash in the street stuck to his skin. It felt dirty. A shiver of disgust wound up his spine, but he kept going. He was almost there.When he reached it, he dropped the cube inside and collapsed on top of it. As his vision finally went completely black and the pain faded away, the last thing he felt was the box being slid through the hole through to the other side.He came to in a hospital, surrounded by doctors in full body protective gear.“Welcome back, Captain,” one of them said. “Agent Carter wishes to pass on her and her team’s thanks for your help in retrieving the Cube.” Steve could hear the capital letter, and wondered if they had discovered anything important enough from it to warrant them. “The team’s precautions proved effective, and doctors in the city report no new cases to be worried about. It has been brought down to the lower levels of the administration building for observation and testing, away from the patients.”He sat up. There was a twinge in his shoulder, and it was a little difficult to rotate it with all the bandages, but it was certainly an improvement.“Once you are feeling up to it,” the doctor continued, “Agent Carter asked that I relay your next assignment to you.” The doctor’s orange-red lips tipped downwards in disapproval, but she handed him a tablet anyway. “The details should be on here. In essence, you are to retrieve the robot that attacked you for Agent Carter’s intelligence team, then get to work evacuating infected civilians to Temporary Military Hospital Block B, outside the city proper. It should be easy to find. Infected civilians and only infected civilians, mind you. Infected military personnel have already been quarantined, and uninfected civilians can still evacuate to one of Azzaye’s moons. Before leaving, you are also to visit the decontamination showers to ensure that you don’t inadvertently spread any diseases you may have picked up from the Cube to the rest of the city.”“What if they just have a cold?” He asked. “Not one of the diseases Hydra dropped?”“It does not matter. We still don’t understand the full scope of the Cube’s capabilities, nor do we have a solid understanding of the illnesses it caused. Thanks to tests conducted while you were unconscious, we know that the light is caused by a sort of radiation, though we are unsure at the moment how this helped spread the diseases. We still have more questions than answers, and so we can’t afford to let any sick citizens off the planet. Even if it looks like a simple cold, it could in fact be something far more deadly.”Steve nodded wearily.“When can I start?”“I am required to tell you that you can start immediately, but I would greatly prefer if you rested for another day. You lost a good deal of blood-”Steve was already out the door.Rounding up infected citizens was awful, but it was a distracting sort of awful. If he was busy guiding people to the sea of tents that was Temporary Military Hospital Block B, then he was helping someone rather than just hanging around Bucky’s bedside. Every time he so much as paused, the temptation to call it a day and go find Bucky’s room again welled up. Every time he pushed it down with a reminder to himself that he was here to help people, not play nursemaid. If he shirked his duties to seek out Bucky now, he’d be in for an exasperated lecture for sure. ‘You were so insistent about coming out here and helping fight Hydra until you keeled over and died, Stevie, and now that you’re out here you hide away with me?’ It was difficult, sometimes, to convince uninfected family members or friends to let him separate them from the infected members of their group, but word had spread through the city that there was a man who immune to everything helping guide people to safety, and most people gave in after he reassured them that the temporary hospital wasn’t testing on people. Testing was being done only on volunteers or the dead.Steve made sure to check for himself to make sure he had the correct information. He’d roamed the entire hospital block, talking to the doctors and some of the patients. Everyone agreed that the more hardcore disease testing had been moved elsewhere, and that while many of the treatments they were administering here were experimental, the subjects clamored to take them.“If I don’t take it, I’ll die, and if I do take it, I only might die,” one patient said with a forced smile. “Why wouldn’t we want to take the treatments?”Despite his reassurances, though, it wasn’t always easy. Parents wanted to go with their infected children, the recently-orphaned didn’t want to leave with a strange man whose definitely-not-orange skin marked him as an outsider, frantic siblings who didn’t want to hand over the ones who ‘only sniffle a little, it’s not bad enough for quarantine!-’ all of them needed to be calmly convinced, no matter how long it took or how hysterical they were.Time became like a rubber band, stretching then snapping forward unpredictably. One moment he was in an interminable conversation with a frazzled father about why his little girl had to go to Block B without him, and the next the sun was lower in the sky and the first of the moons were starting to rise. Faces blurred together, journeys to Block B became one long, never-ending journey. Events that seemed distinct and memorable as he experienced them sank into an ocean of similar memories, losing all distinction and screwing up his internal clock beyond repair. It wasn’t until an agent wearing a plague mask laid a hand on his shoulder and told him to head back to the ship docking area for the day that he realized how long he’d been at it.“You did good work today, Captain,” the agent said. “Thank you.”“It’s what I signed up to do,” he said.“Still. Without you, we’d have to send other, less protected people to round people up.”“You would have managed it.”The agent shook their head sadly.“I think not. The death toll among doctors and first responders is amazingly high. Even strong, healthy doctors in their prime started falling sick after a day. Whoever we sent out to round people up would have been handed a death sentence. Even with a full-body protection suit, it’s risky.”“Are they any closer to a cure?” he asked.The agent shrugged. “Hard to know for sure, but they got awful excited about something about an hour ago. I’d say they’re making progress.”Steve nodded, saluted, and walked off towards the ship docks. Time to go see Bucky.“I’m sorry, Captain Rogers,” the nurse said. Her expression dripped with pity, and Steve’s stomach dropped. “We did everything we could, but it was a completely unknown disease, and they were already weakened from their initial illnesses.”
No. This couldn’t be happening.
“Your friend held out for a long time, but he succumbed to his illness last night. His body temperature fell precipitously after his nastiest fever yet, and his systems were unable to recover.”
It couldn’t be true.
“We understand that this must be a very difficult time for you, Captain, and there are grief counselors available if you feel you need them.”
Oh god oh Bucky oh god what was he going to do without the other half of his soul he felt like he’d been ripped in half and was bleeding everywhere it hurt where was Bucky he was always there when it hurt-
“…and I would like to say on behalf of all of our staff here, thank you for your service, Captain.”He missed whatever came before that, but it didn’t matter. Bucky was dead. Worse, he was dead of an unknown, untreatable disease; all of his things would be burned, and if there was a funeral the casket would be empty. No one, much less a civilian mortician, was going to go anywhere near his body except to dispose of it before it became even more of a biohazard than it already was. He was the one who was supposed to die of illness! Not Bucky. Not the man who walked off blue fever when it put everyone else on his shift in their beds or in the hospital. Not the man who always sat at Steve’s sickbed and nursed him even when he was turning funny colors and coughing up his lungs. Not the center of his world.He nodded robotically and left as fast as he could, he was probably forgetting something or horribly offending someone but he didn’t care. He just had to get out of there.It was like the fire inside him had gone out. His emotions were gone, leaving his world flat, grey and barren. He forced himself to get up and do things rather than just lay about listlessly all day, but come evening he’d forgotten what exactly it was that he had done for the past several hours, and he didn’t care to remember. The only thing he felt was the hole in his side where a vital chunk of himself had been gouged out and disposed of in a sealed biohazard containment unit. Every time he looked down at himself, however, his eyes twisted the knife by lying and telling him he was whole.It wasn’t that he wanted to die, exactly. He just didn’t want to continue to exist without Bucky. That wasn’t good enough for the military psyche team, but none of the pills they gave him helped. He told them not to worry, it wasn’t their fault no one had invented a pill to bring back the dead.He ended up wandering around the medical base. No one stopped him; he was Steve Rogers, the man who couldn’t get sick. Sometimes the doctors asked him not to touch things, in case he carried germs on his skin, but after a while the doctors must have realized that he wasn’t touching anything. He was just wandering.There was an army general on their way to pick him up and take him to the next place that needed him. He relished the thought of doing something meaningful almost as much as he abhorred it. Getting on one of those high-tech, sleek-lined military spaceships and preparing to walk into a war zone seemed too much like moving on, and he didn’t think he could move on.He was wandering around in a daze, letting his grief chase itself in circles when a smartly-dressed woman approached him. She was vaguely familiar, so he must have seen her on some mission or other. Her uniform was neat and tidy and he had no idea which unit it was supposed to be from. After a few seconds of grasping wildly like a monkey trying to grab a piece of fruit just out of reach, the name Peggy Carter drifted up from his memories of one of his earlier missions.“Ma’am,” he said deferentially but without enthusiasm. It didn’t feel right on his tongue, but he couldn’t summon up the energy care about how monotone his voice sounded.“Steve Rogers. Has anyone spoken with you about the Mutation Cube?” She asked, cutting straight to the point. Her words took a few moments to reach him through his haze, but when they did they dragged him into alertness. The Mutation Cube and the experiments HYDRA had done with it were the reason Bucky was dead. If there was something left for him to care about, it was that abomination.“No,” he said. “Someone briefly mentioned the possibility of storing it on an uninhabited asteroid for a bit while they figured out what to do with it, but…” But he had never followed up, never asked anyone or attended any meetings to come up with a strategy to keep it safely contained and out of range of innocent civilians. In fact, he didn’t even know if there had been any meetings. No one had interrupted his grieving to tell him about any.Peggy Carter nodded sharply like this was about what she had expected.“I don’t believe anything of the sort is going to happen.”“What?”Dread began to rise in his chest, displacing the heavy blanket of sadness that had muffled the world since getting the news of Bucky’s death.“I have been trying to get a solid answer on what is to be done with the Cube since you recovered it, and not once have I gotten a straight, verifiable answer. I thought that was suspicious, so I got my fellow agents together and we did a bit of investigating. Rather than find a secret containment plan, we discovered that several people assigned to the temporary safeguarding of the Cube have been compromised.”“How so?” He asked, but he already knew the answer.“Several members were seen sending or receiving confidential messages, which one of my agents tracked back to a planet that has been under Hydra’s control for quite some time. I was able to intercept some of these messages, and they’re damning.”She handed him a messy stack of papers- actual, physical papers, like she was afraid to keep it on a tablet- and jabbed her perfectly painted fingernails at the important bits. He read, slowly at first then faster as the urgency of the situation became more and more apparent.Hydra agents had infiltrated the army, and they were planning to get the Cube back. They didn’t have enough people planted in high enough places to simply make off with it, not with all the security built into the very frames of the buildings of the medical camp. It didn’t matter if you were pilfering pain meds or stealing machines capable of decimating cities, military medical security would find you. Instead, they would make the security irrelevant by killing anyone who could come running to stop them by using the Cube to release a highly infectious disease into the hospital and wait for it to spread. They estimated it would take a day to have compromised most of the base, and another day or so before all those infected were too weak to be of any use in a fight, and anywhere from two days to two weeks before they died of the side effects.He flipped to the last page and his heart stopped dead in his chest.They got those estimates from testing on Bucky.His mind raced back to his conversation with Bucky when he’d first reached the base. Bucky had mentioned that he and the other patients had originally been sick with something else, and that they had gotten infected while they were being treated in the hospital. They got sick with the untreatable disease while they were in the hospital. They were isolated, off in their own room, with doctors constantly running tests and military medical security tracking their vitals.They had been test subjects. Hydra gave him that disease, along with all those other soldiers, something they’d cooked up in that Cube that none of them could ever hope to have any immunity to, and waited for them to die so they could watch how their little invention went about killing them. Perhaps they had tried out some actual treatments, just to see how the disease thwarted them.He wanted to throw up. Bucky hadn’t just died, he’d been murdered by the doctors he’d trusted to try and save him. And Steve had gone and put the murder weapon where Hydra could get it’s grubby paws on it all over again, endangering everyone’s life in the process.“None of us can approach the Cube safely,” Peggy said, interrupting his spiraling thoughts. His eyes snapped up to her and he hung on to her words like a dying man to a lifeline.“There could be all manner of other engineered diseases stored inside. We would just be doing Hydra’s work for them.” She paused meaningfully. “But not you. You’re immune to everything.”Steve heard the slight tremble in her voice that betrayed her uncertainty. Sure, he hadn’t fallen to anything he’d faced so far, but perhaps the Cube could produce something even he couldn’t fight. Perhaps there was a way to circumvent the serum and kill him that Erskine’s genius couldn’t foresee. He found he didn’t care very much. If he died, he died, and if he didn’t, he could take that blasted thing and get on the first solo spaceship he could find. He could aim the ship for nothing, for the spaces between places, and just go. A ship designed for distance travel would have a cryo unit and he could just strap himself in, program the coordinates and go to sleep. The spaceship would never land anywhere, and he would never awake. Someday, while he slept, blissfully unaware, his sleep would slip into death, and he could join Bucky.It was the closest idea he’d heard yet to just not existing anymore. He liked it a lot.He followed Peggy through the neat, clean hallways of the main non-medical building on the base. Every once in a while she flashed a badge or submitted to a fingerprint scan, but most of the soldiers on duty took one look at Steve and let the two of them through.As they journeyed deeper into the building, the hallways got longer and darker and the stairways longer and more twisting. His footsteps echoed, and slowly the little noises native to out-of-the-way places- the light dripping of water from a small leak that was never important enough or noticed enough to get fixed, the scurrying of a tiny creature’s feet, so light he almost thought he was imagining it- began to replace the sounds of voices and people bustling about.Eventually, Peggy stopped outside a dark door with several locks on it. This one required a fingerprint test and a retinal scan from her, as well as a long password hurriedly pounded out on a holographic keyboard. Once it swung open, she pulled him inside and shut it quickly behind them.Only the light of various screen savers, beeping machines, and the Cube lit the darkness of the room, but it was more than enough to see by. The Cube glowed such a bright blue that only the far corners of the containment room were completely in shadow. It reminded him of the slime pits back home in New Brooklyn. It was encased in multiple semi-see through coverings, and was physically separated from the rest of the room by thick, bulletproof glass, but the glow was undimmed.“I’ll have to leave before you open that,” Peggy said, “So I won’t be here to walk you through all the safeguards. Make sure and remember, the other covers have to come off before you open the glass, or it sets off the alarm. The last thing we need to do is draw any more attention to ourselves than we already did just by coming down here. I don’t know if they have people watching for any non-Hydra visitors so they can alert the higher-ups, and I don’t want to find out.”Steve nodded. It sounded simple enough.“This red button here opens the glass, and these white dials retract the other covers. You’ll want to turn them all the way to ‘off.’ It doesn’t matter what order you do those in, just do them all before you touch the red button. Once the glass opens, grab it quickly and run. Don’t stop for anyone, no matter how official their uniform or how many times you’ve seen them around the hospital. The door at the end of this hallway opens on the underground emergency hangar. There should be several single- and double-person spaceships there. Pick one and take off. Don’t worry about programming your course or any of that, just get off the ground and get out of here. You can fiddle with the course once you’re in orbit. After that, send out a message letting us know where you’re headed and we’ll intercept you.”She grabbed a piece of paper off a nearby table and scrawled out an address.“Type this into the onboard communication system, it will get you in contact with me or someone else from my unit. I’m sure none of us are Hydra. If you don’t get an answer from us, contact a general. There should be addresses on the ship for those.”Steve nodded. He felt like that was all he could do in the face of her stream of words and orders.She looked like she wanted to say something else to him, but after a moment she just straightened her shoulders and nodded decisively at him.“Good luck, Captain,” she said. “I’ll head back up out of here. Move quickly.”Her shoes squeaked as she quickly turned on her heel and marched out of the room. He didn’t watch her go; he couldn’t seem to make his eyes move from the Cube, the murder weapon, they murdered Bucky-. The door slammed solidly behind her, leaving him alone with it, but he barely noticed.He twisted the white dials methodically, hands moving almost on their own. His mind was already up in the stratosphere, watching the blackness of space closing in and welcoming it.Even when the final glass barrier retreated and he reached out to pick up the Cube, it felt like he was watching himself do it. Its slime pit-blue light bounced off his pale forearm, and for a split second Bucky wasn’t dead, Steve’s immune system was weak, and war had never touched their lives. And then the moment was over, and the Cube was in his palm.It vibrated slightly, and sometimes the glow seemed to pulsate a bit, but other than that it was inert in his hand. He didn’t collapse in spasms or start coughing up his lungs, so Peggy must have been right. If it was dangerous, it didn’t affect him. He didn’t feel any relief at the realization.He left the door open behind him as he jogged down the hall to the hangar. Shutting it felt like too much effort to spend on something not directly related to the Cube. Not directly related to Bucky’s murder, his subconscious said. The spaceships were there, just like Peggy said they’d be. He leaped into the first one-person ship he saw, and slammed the door shut.Alarms blared behind him, but by the time anyone reached the emergency hangar, the doors were already open and Steve was flying toward the empty sky, Peggy’s note forgotten in his pocket. Eyes wet and mind still foggy with grief, he stashed the cube under the pilot’s chair, set and autopilot course for a random direction, and climbed into the cryo unit welded to the floor in the very back, near the emergency escape hatch.Sweet, Bucky-filled sleep awaited him, and so long as he didn’t by some miracle run into another planet or something, he would never have to wake up. With steady hands he pressed the button to seal the cryo unit and start cryo sleep.First the darkness descended, then the cold creeped over his skin, and then he was dreaming.Steve came out of the darkness slowly, as though he was being pulled from a bog. He wondered if he’d fallen in one of the slime pits outside New Brooklyn’s poorly-defined city limits. Bucky would be annoyed at him if he had. He was surely in for a lecture on how he needed to be more careful, that stuff was thicker than water and if he didn’t watch himself he’d end up drowned.
Why would I be careful when I know you always pull me out? Besides, we took swimming lessons together you jerk, and you can swim in it just fine, what makes you think I can’t?
He tried to speak, but his mouth was closed and tasted like old, nasty air, the way it did when he woke up properly after being in the hospital for a few nights.That was odd. Usually he was spitting blue slime right about now, and that stuff always tasted vaguely like stale skyseed bread, only wetter. He wrinkled his nose, only he didn’t because the skin on his face wouldn’t wrinkle.It wouldn’t move at all.Alarm poured into his bloodstream, trying in vain to tense his muscles and shake his nerves out of their inaction. He realized for the first time that he felt cold, colder than that time the hospital lost power back during the earthquake of 3712 and he’d been woken from a deep sleep by the sound of the heavy medical scanners that the nurses pushed from room to room slamming against the walls as the earth bucked and rolled. His body temperature had already been low from sleep, but the self-heating blankets had fallen off and the central heating was down and the windows were cracked in places and gone in others so there was nothing to stop the wind from howling through the broken glass and into his teliorefis-weakened lungs. Bucky had come running before the shaking had properly stopped and picked the blankets up off the floor and hugged him until he stopped shivering.There were no blankets or wind or Bucky, and he wasn’t in a hospital.He tried to shift, but it was like trying to open your eyes when they’ve been taped shut.His heartbeat sluggishly increased, but not fast enough. His muscles rebelled when he tried to move them, but through the pain and the cold and the numbness he managed to get a twitch of his finger, or at least he thought he had, and that was motivation enough for him to start struggling in earnest.“Oh wait, I think he’s coming to.”There was a voice, strange and far away. It was difficult to parse, but Steve strained towards it.“Sir, I don’t believe it would be beneficial for the patient to wake up at this juncture.”His thoughts were so slow, like he was burning with fever rather than freezing in some unknown place with unseen strangers. How many of them were there? There were two voices, but did that mean there were only two people?”“He’s been asleep for a long time, J. You sure it’s safe give him drugs?”“I think it is much safer than allowing him to be conscious for the full defrost process. You must be very careful in how you warm him up, or he will suffer tissue and nerve damage at the very least.”“Okay, okay, I hear you. Think tezzinine will be enough to keep him out?”Tezzinine. The more potent form of processed tezzi powder. Memories of wading through bars filled with tezzi smoke and sitting just above the glowing tezziplant byproduct slime pits wafted up from wherever it was memories went when you weren’t looking at them, full of soft colored lights and sticky heat. Bucky’s face looked almost fantastical when the lights reflected off his sweat, especially the red and purple ones. In his mind’s eye, he looked like a fallen angel come to charm his soul away. But Bucky would never do anything like that unless he was planning to wrap his soul in blankets and stick it in a disinfected quarantine room.What a silly thought to have.Where was Bucky? Even if they weren’t at a hospital, something was wrong with Steve’s body, and Bucky always did whatever he could to help when Steve was sick.Somewhere, an awful, icy thought began to rise out of his mixed-up thoughts, but the tezzinine hit his system before he had the chance to properly think it.The second time he woke, his head was clear and cold with the knowledge that Bucky was dead.He was in the same room as before, or at least a very similar one. Various beeps and whirs and electric whines made the room sound like it was full of strange, mechanical insects. When he opened his eyes, he was greeted by a room full of wires and holograms and half-formed metal somethings that sat on benches and table tops near piles and piles of paper.“Ah, you’re awake!”His head whipped to the side so fast his neck muscles pulsed painfully.A man sat on his left with a tablet in one hand and a mug in the other. For a second, Steve’s brain tried match this familiar looking man with the name Howard Stark. He had the same hair, the same facial structure, the same clever bend in his mouth, but the face those similar features formed was the face of a stranger.“Where am I?” He said. It would have disappointed him that the words lacked feeling beyond a sense of resignation, but remembering Bucky’s death after his confused haze had left him too cold for his usual fire.“You are on Blue Maimi.” The man set his mug down and looked up from his tablet, and suddenly Steve was pinned under his calculating gaze. “One of my satellites saw your spacecraft headed for Red Maimi, and raised the alarm. We attempted to communicate, but you were entirely unresponsive so I sent up a drone to intercept you.”Steve wracked his brains as the man talked. Where was Blue Maimi again?“So the drone comes up and attaches to the side of your ship, and still it’s all silent on the front. Not even an attempt to dislodge it. Now that’s about as suspicious as a Han Tan ship with no lights on, so I beat feet up to catch your ship and bring you down by force. Worst comes to worst, you’re the shittiest pilot ever and you don’t know how to work the radio, right?”Han Tan ship? What sort of ship was that, and what did it’s lighting situation have to do with anything?The man paused and offered him a sea-green mug. “Here, drink while I talk. You need to replenish your electrolytes and a whole bunch of other crap you need to live in the next couple of hours.”Steve accepted the mug quietly. It was full of a thick purple liquid. Heat radiated through the sides and handle, warming his palms. He sipped it once, barely allowing any of the viscous liquid to slip past his lips, then lowered it to his lap. The man raised an eyebrow, but continued with his story.“So imagine my surprise when I pry my way into the cockpit with a crowbar and find you in a super old-model cryo tank. Like, dinosaurs-old. Seriously, I’m surprised the thing hadn’t broken down with you still inside it. The ship’s computer said you were still alive, so I started defrosting you.”He grabbed a thermos with stylized tentacles drawn clinging to the side.“Once you finish that, you can start on this one. If I’m hacking this right, you haven’t eaten anything in a hundred years.”Steve blinked, then took a larger sip of the purple liquid. It flowed softly and just this side of slowly down his throat, leaving a grape aftertaste.“Who are you?” He asked.The man smirked. His goatee made the expression look bigger and more animated.“I was about to ask you the same question. It’s a special type of person that goes to Red Maimi just because they feel like it. And in the company of a glowing blue cube that I just so happen to know looks just like the Cube Hydra used to launch its first large-scale bioweapons, no less.”“My name is Steve Rogers.” The words felt like ice in his throat. It felt like his name should have changed somehow, like he can’t possibly be the same person who used to cuddle with Bucky Barnes and drink the weak blue teas he made to stave off new illnesses and went for day trips to the slime pits because it was cheap and dangerous and he liked feeling like he could do something dangerous without immediately coughing up blood and dying. If Bucky was gone, then he should have taken a part of very Steve’s identity with him.A strange expression flitted across the man’s face.“Nice to meet you, Steve Rogers. I’m Tony Stark. Would you, by any chance, be the same Steve Rogers who stole a cube full of Hydra-engineered protein-mutators and blasted yourself into the stratosphere with them?”Steve nodded slowly. “Would you be related to Howard Stark in any way?”“He was my father,” Tony said, in much the same way one said he was my mortal enemy whom I last saw years ago when he stabbed me and left me to die in an abandoned basement somewhere. “Just a minute, there’s something I suddenly need to tend to.”Tony rose, turned, and left the room without a sound. A few seconds later, Steve heard glass shatter, followed by indistinct shouting. Several strong thuds vibrated through the walls, making small objects shutter in place. More shouting, and then silence.A few minutes later, Tony returned, knuckles wrapped in a light gauze and holding two new mugs. His smile was a lot calmer now. Something smelled like smoke.“Excuse me. Timed experiments, you know the jig. Smoothie?”He offered Steve the mug in his left hand.“You’ll have to finish the other stuff I gave you first, of course, but I’m sure you’re hungry enough to drink them both.”“Thank you.” He took a sip.“Now, where were we?” Tony asked. His smile was welcoming but his eyes said don’t ask. “We were talking about why I was going to Red Maimi by myself on a spaceship incapable of standard interstellar transport speeds alone and in cryo-sleep.”Tony smiled. “Right, right. So, what’s the deal?”Steve pushed down the sadness that welled up in him like a tidal wave and focused on relating the story of finding, losing, then recovering the Cube from Hydra. He didn’t think he did too good of a job, since about halfway through Tony offered him a box of tissues even though he knew he wasn’t crying, but he kept going.When he finished, Tony patted his shoulder awkwardly.“Well, it’s good to know I don’t have to take you out.”“What?” Steve asked, surprised.“You should probably start drinking that second thermos right about now. It’s the antidote to the first one.”
“You poisoned me?”
“Just a mild, painless incapacitator. Don’t look at me like that, think about how this looked from my end. A strange ship headed for Red Maimi, a planet so ravaged by Hydra’s weapons that by the latest estimates the disease-related death toll is in the trillions, carrying an unidentifiable man and a known Hydra bioweapon? That had Plaguebringer written all over it. I had to make sure you wouldn’t escape.”Steve waited for the anger to break through his apathy, to boil him inside and send him leaping to his feet. When it didn’t come, he took a long sip from the second thermos.“What’s a Plaguebringer?”“It’s my pet project,” Tony replied. He made a gesture in the air with his fingers and a holoscreen appeared. “Most people have given up on finding him, but I’m not going to. Never in a million years. He’s a person, sort of, but also sort of a bioweapon. I don’t know for sure if he’s working with Hydra or if he’s being forced against his will, but whatever the case he shows up on some planet Hydra wants decimated, goes on a whirlwind tour of the largest cities, always accompanied by someone else, and leaves Hydra-engineered plagues in his wake. The water he drinks turns to one huge disease vector. The people he touches end up in the hospital dying of some previously-unseen disease hours later. Once people caught on to him it was easy enough to get some pictures of his face, but no one’s been able to catch him or his various handlers yet.”Tony glanced meaningfully at Steve’s second thermos, and he took another sip.“Most people think he’s with Hydra willingingly, but I’m not so sure. Some of the footage I’ve been able to dredge up suggests otherwise. But one way or another, I want him out of Hydra’s hands. So I’ve been searching. When you showed up, I thought I’d hit the jackpot.”For a brief, brief second, Steve considered trying to start over again, a hundred years in the future and without Bucky, while the fight against Hydra was apparently still raging. Then he leaned in and asked, “Do you want some help finding him?”Tony’s electronic database labeled Plaguebringer was full of data sheets, eye-witness testimonies, files he’d ‘borrowed’ from various government organizations, pictures, and videos. Most of the photos were of the effects of various diseases, or places that the Plaguebringer had gone. However, picture #466 was a recent face shot from a camera still of the Plaguebringer being dragged around a busy city square on Savezza, a prominent trading partner of both Azzaye and Azzan O-1 from another galaxy that, Tony’s notes on the photo read, had been a major contributor to the fight against Hydra since the economic disaster that Hydra’s bioweapons had caused on said planets.Steve nearly put a fist through the computer.His eyes may have been dazed, his skin may have been sickly pale, the bags under his eyes may have been enormous, and he may not look like he’d aged a day in the hundred years since he had supposedly died, but that man was Bucky, clear as day.“How far is Savezza?” He demanded.“Not far, maybe a day by StarkShip." Tony said. "Why do you ask?”“I’d know that face anywhere.”Nuova Sicilia was a gorgeous city of soaring towers that gleamed in the too-close, too-bright sun. It was winter here, but Savezza was much closer to it’s sun than Steve’s planet. A colorful crowd bustled through the landing station. People with blue, purple, green, red, orange, mottled, marbled, textured skin, three eyes, six fingers, no ears, strangely colored hair walked past him, and his focus flitted around from face to alien face without ever settling on anything worth paying attention to. The cobblestones rippled and glowed faintly under his feet, which ratcheted up his anxiety. It felt like thousands of eyes were upon him.Tony steered him with a light hand on his back, quickly and efficiently guiding him through the busier part of the space port and into the city proper, where they could start looking for Bucky.“I’ve sent out some discrete drones. If they catch sight of his face or anyone else from the company he was supposed to be part of, they’ll send me a signal. Until then, you should probably rest. High-speed space travel may be convenient, but it’s not fun for someone who’s body isn’t used to it. Really weakens the immune system.”Steve refused Tony’s offered hand.“My cells are more resilient than that. I don’t need to rest, I need to look for Bucky myself.”“And how are you going to do that, huh?” Tony demanded. “Walk down the middle of the street in a city full of Hydra agents, drawing all sorts of attention to yourself, getting lost and making me come find you? Are you going to just wander into the mountains and hope you stumble over a scrap of clothing from his uniform that smells like him so you can track him like a dog? What plan do you have? I’m all ears.”He deflated. Tony was right. He should rest, if only so that he’d be in peak form if Bucky was in danger. He just couldn’t shake the feeling that lying down and sleeping while Bucky was still out there was some sort of horrible betrayal.“Alright. What’s your plan?”“So, you wanna find the Plaguebringer, bring him in from the cold, take down the rest of HYDRA while you’re at it. Nice goals, way to aim high.”Steve waited for the ‘let’s make this a little more down-to-earth’ shpiel. None of those goals were negotiable, but when laid out like that it did sound like a bit much. He thought perhaps he should have been mad, but there was just an empty pit in his stomach where the anger used to bubble up.Tony surprised him, though, and just kept right on plowing ahead.“So I’m thinking the first thing you’ll want to do is get information. If they used Bucky as a test subject then there’s probably a record of the results floating around somewhere.”Steve nodded, and tried to force his face into something appropriately invested. Even if it wasn’t convincing, it covered up the cold pit of emptiness where his emotions were supposed to be.“Where would we get intel like that?”Tony shrugged.“My intelligence suggests there might be a Hydra base nearby. If he’s really your Bucky, then that adds evidence to my theory that he’s not with them willingly, so they must be storing him somewhere in between trips to Red Maimi’s largest cities. How do you feel about breaking and entering?”The mountain was much colder than the low-lying city. Strange, pink snow fell in little flurries, softening the sight of the garish red trees that covered the whole area. The thick carpet of leaves resembled dried gore, and was regularly interspersed with rose-colored branches and sticks that made him feel like he was wading through a landscape of blood.Tony’s strange flying red suit blended in shocking well up here, as did his little drones. The whir of the suits repulsors and the crunch of the leaves and twigs like breaking bones under his feet kept the silence of the snowfall from really sticking. If anyone was sticking out here, it was him.He didn’t feel cold, per se, but he could feel that the breeze was brisk up here. Before the serum, he probably would have come down with a cold just by standing in air this temperature. Temperatures like this would be rough on Bucky’s health, hardy immune system or no.He picked up the pace a little.At last they rounded a rock face and came face to face with an enormous stone gate. It didn’t look like any of the other rocks they’d passed on their way up the mountain - it was dark, smooth in a compressed sort of way, and shot through with veins of white. He’d guess it was imported from an asteroid, but it certainly wasn’t from anywhere nearby.They backed away, letting the rock face hide them from sight.“This is it. You ready?”“I’ve been ready since we landed.”“Then let’s go.”Steve waited for Tony to get into position above the castle. Once he got the signal that he had found that sweet spot between close enough to set off any security systems and so far away that he was out of range on the coms, he grabbed one of the little pink stones on the ground and hurled it through the gates.An alarm blared immediately, so loud he was sure everyone on the mountain heard it, followed by bright lights and security guards. His fingers twitched, but he remained still and silent. Eventually, he saw Tony’s suit fly up and away into the clouds, beyond the range of any weapons a facility of this size would be able to hide.A few seconds later, he dove back down out of the sky like an eagle descending upon a snake in the grass. Steve felt the ground shake with several powerful, percussive strikes, and then the armor was ascending again. The battery continued for several more swoops, until one time Tony didn’t descend again.Once he was sure he wasn’t coming back, Steve leapt to his feet and dashed through the blown-open gates.The grounds resembled a log that had attracted the interest of a large woodpecker. Holes and debris gave the whole place the feel of a war zone, but without the expected number of scattered bodies. Small, perfectly round burns sprinkled the area between the holes. Footprints in the dirt told a jumbled, confused story of defense and retreat.The first part of Tony’s plan seemed to have gone off without a hitch. Every soldier who responded to the threat, which theoretically was all of them save those with specialized tasks, had run out to engage Tony, only to be forced south, away from the main entrance and down into the bloody woods.Ahead of him, the main gates were opened from the initial charge. They were blocked, however, by two little flying drones. If he had to guess, Steve would bet those drones were the ones behind those little burns. They had to have been using something to keep the soldiers from re-entering the castle.He nodded to them, and they allowed him to pass. One of them followed after him, and the other remained guarding the door.The inside of the castle was cold, much colder than anywhere else he’d been on this warm planet. They must be cooling it down for some reason. He frowned. He had no idea why cooler temperatures would be advantageous, and there were enough unknowns in this rescue mission already.He was under attack almost immediately. Bullets hailed down on him. They bounced off his shield and the suit Tony had given him, but the ones that connected were sure to leave bruises. Laser beams from the drone flashed over his shoulder whenever it could get a clear shot, but it couldn’t get them all. Not without hitting Steve or moving from its place blocking the door.A flash of pain shot through Steve’s left arm. He glanced to the side; a thin, needle-shaped bullet had pierced Tony’s suit. He felt a trickle of blood wetting the inside of his arm.He’d never seen anything like it. It was almost like a dart, but far stronger. Tony had said that the specialized material should stand up to anything short of a ballistic missile. Where did this thing fall on that scale? Did Tony even know about it? Could Hydra have secret weapons that not even he knew about?He shivered.And then the screaming started.It took Steve by surprise, and he almost got shot. The soldiers he was fighting, on the other hand, immediately stumbled to a halt. Horror filled their faces. For a few seconds the air was so thick with fear, Steve didn’t think it was even possible to move. Then, the soldiers who hadn’t yet been taken out turned and fled.The drone didn’t shoot them as they pushed their way out of the castle. It beeped in confusion, but apparently decided it didn’t need to kill people who were already fleeing.Within seconds, Steve was left alone with the drone and the bodies cooling on the stone floor. And whoever was screaming.It wasn’t just a single voice, but a whole group of voices all together like a horrible, rose-red bouquet of sound that pricked painfully at his eardrums like thorns. Sometimes a particularly memorable voice would cut out or join in, but the main impression was just of a confusing tangle of screams all knotted up into one primordial scream.It went on for nearly forty-five seconds before finally petering out. After the last voice was silenced, the silence that rang through the stone room made Steve’s bones shiver.He steeled himself and picked his way around the bodies towards the walls. A light buzz from behind told him that Tony’s drone was accompanying him. The echo of his footsteps bounced off the walls and set his heartbeat racing for no good reason, so he was happy for the company, such that it was.A sudden thought came to him. He turned and addressed the drone, which was hovering a few feet behind and to his left.“Can you get Tony on the line?” He asked. It beeped in an ambiguously upbeat pattern, which he took as an affirmative. Several seconds later, the drone beeped and hummed and Tony’s voice came crackling through its speakers.“Okay, I don’t think these guys are going to be any more trouble anytime soon. Also, wanna tell me why all the guys you were going to fight came running like a swarm of bats from Hydra hell? Not that I can’t deal with them, but I’m kinda curious what you did to pull that off.”“I didn’t do anything. A bunch of people started screaming from somewhere deeper inside, and they all just turned tail and fled.”“Well that’s ominous.” A pause. “And probably important. Think you can find where it was coming from?”“Sure, though I don’t know how fast I can do it. Can you give me a direction to start?”“Oh Cap, I am the king of tech, I’m hurt that you thought there was even a possibility that I couldn’t. Now, you’re gonna want to keep to the left for a while. My other drones say there are a bunch of heat signatures below your feet and to the left. Try and find a staircase. Make sure and let the drone go first- there’s bound to still be hostiles inside.”“Got it.”It took him a few minutes to find a staircase, but he eventually found one hidden down a short corridor and behind a large, heavy-looking door that had been left ajar, probably by some soldier responding to the alarm. He and the drone slipped through it and down the steps.Once they neared the bottom, the drone sped up and flew ahead of Steve. He picked up the pace a little, noticing that his breath began to form a visible vapour as he did so. It was getting colder the further down they went.The drone turned abruptly and flew into a room on the left. Steve heard the whir of lasers and the loud pops and crackles of return fire. A voice shouted, but it was muffled and hard to hear, like the speaker had a sock in their mouth. Finally, the firefight ceased, and the only sound Steve could hear over his own breathing was a series of distressed beeps.He reached the bottom of the stairs and walked through the blasted-open door into the side room, where he almost immediately tripped over a body. He managed to catch himself on a clean metal table covered in sterilization equipment, which send a series of horrifying images through his mind of someone using those things on Bucky. Once they’d tied him up and laid him out, they could have done anything to him, and he wouldn’t have been able to do anything but lay there and wait-He shook his head to clear it. Not useful right now.The room was filled with refrigerators and large cryo chambers. One or two were broken open and spilling cold air into the room. Others were empty or lay disconnected on their sides. Shards of glass littered the floor. Steve’s eyes darted to the body again, and this time he noticed that it was bleeding from a stab wound. Tony’s drone was only equipped with lasers.His heart pounded faster in his ears as he walked past one of the busted cryo units. Bucky had been here, possibly even in this room. He tried to picture it, but when he thought of Bucky he thought of warmth and blankets and hot chocolate. Bucky didn’t belong in this slowly freezing basement.A flicker of movement drew his eyes to the side, but it was gone before he could see more than that. He paused for a moment, then walked in the direction of the movement. If something or someone other than the drone was down here with them, he wanted to know.Where had the drone gotten to? They couldn’t get the information they needed if they didn’t have the drone to carry the precious files to the safety of Tony’s place. Fear made his heart clench. Had it been shot? He’d heard a firefight, but he’d thought the drone won. It had still been beeping after the last shot, after all.He thought about calling out to it, but immediately dismissed the idea. If someone else was down here, he needed to neutralize them first, then get data for Tony, then worry about the drone.He cautiously stepped around another cryo pod, moving slowly and deliberately. His muscles had tensed into tight, vibrating violin strings. He could almost imagine them shrieking out Hitchcock-style horror music to the beat of his pounding heart. Broken glass covered the ground, reflecting little pieces of the fluorescent light and laboratory distractingly back at him.He heard a soft breath, and froze.Footsteps echoed quietly off the concrete. Somebody was walking slowly towards him. Every once in a while, they stepped on glass and it crunched under their weight.He adjusted his grip on his shield, then stepped out from behind the cryo unit.And came face to face with Bucky.Heat flooded his body like lava, sluggishly burning through his skin and nerves until it reached the tips of his fingers and toes. Part of it was joy, wild and near-painful in its intensity. Part of it was anger, the hot, driving kind he hadn’t felt since getting into the spaceship. Adrenaline, pain, fear, hope; so many chemical signals hit him at the same time, he felt like he could slide a knife over his palm until he bled and set the blood on fire.“Bucky?”Bucky stared at him with dull, sick-looking eyes. Tony’s drone was vibrating in one gloved hand, and he held a gun in the other. His hair was damp, like it had been covered in snow, then quickly thawed. He was pale, paler than Steve had ever seen him, paler even than that cold winter when the heater in their apartment broke during a blizzard and it was too dangerous for the repairman to come fix it until the next day.He took a step forwards, and Bucky slowed to a halt. His thick, heavy-looking boots seemed like they were the only reason he was still standing.“Bucky?” He asked again.“Who the hell are you?”Steve knew he couldn’t get sick, not anymore, but those words made that weak, hot feeling that always accompanied a strong fever blossom in his chest.“What do you- how did you survive?” He looked wildly around the cryo chamber before his eyes were drawn back to Bucky. Up until now the horror of the room had been a distant, unthinkable thing, a place of suffering that he hadn’t felt and couldn’t dwell on if he wanted to stop Hydra and prevent others from suffering in the future. But all of a sudden that suffering was Bucky’s and the chill in the air felt like death’s breath on his skin. There were bodies on the floor, leaking blood into the little puddles were ice and ice substitutes had were melting at a glacial pace, and blood dripped from Bucky’s knuckles like tears.Bucky stared at him like he was some sort of unexpected, dangerous wild animal he might have to wrestle. He was unarmed, but his fingers twitched and his cheek muscles twitched. There was a rash on the side of his neck, just visible for a moment when he gulped, that looked exactly like the plague rashes Steve had seen on Azzaye.“I always survive,” Bucky replied.Steve stumbled forward a step. His boot splashed in a thin puddle of blood, melted cryo ice, and whatever used to be in the broken test tube the dead scientist to his left still clutched in her blue fingers. Bucky pulled his lips back in a half-snarl.“What are you, stupid? Quit stepping in the experimental who-knows-what, you’ll be dying of some horrific new disease within the week.” he growled. His voice was lower than normal, Steve realized distantly, the way it got when he was sick with the flu and had to take a day off from work.He took another tentative step forward.“Don’t worry about me, Buck. I’m durable. It’s you I’m here for you.” Bucky shook his head violently and jerked back, putting another dead scientist between them.“No, no I escaped, fair and square! I killed Pierce, I got the pink-haired one without any eyes, I got even got Rollins!” He grew steadily more agitated, until he was spitting furiously with each syllable. “You can’t have me. I’ll hold my breath until I die before I let you get me with the needles!”“Okay, okay, how about I stay over here,” Steve said. He held his hands open in front of him, where Bucky could easily see them and tried to communicate as much guilelessness as possible. Bucky still looked suspicious.“It doesn’t matter if you do want me, anyhow. You’ll die just like they did.” He nodded at the bodies. “I locked them in here with me, and by the time your little drone knocked the door down they were all dead. They were gonna soup me up with another one of the diseases No-Eyes is always cooking up, but I slipped my leash before they got the chance.”His hissed words dug into Steve like claws. He wanted to be sick, but neither words nor bile could get past his throat. He managed a sort of word-shaped choking sound, but Bucky bowled him over.“And it’s no good using Stevie’s face to trick me. Stevie must be long dead by now. I’ve gotten wise to that shit.”Bucky’s chest rose and fell as quick as a panting dog. His mouth was still open, like more horrible, horrified words could come tumbling out at any moment. His eyes darted all over the room, but always slid back to Steve. For the first time Steve realized he wasn’t breathing through his nose at all.The drone beeped.Steve’s attention snapped to the little machine in Bucky’s hand the same time as Bucky’s did. For a second he was afraid Bucky would crush it in his hand. But he seemed just as focused on it’s speakers as Steve.“Yo Steve! I’ve dealt with all the agents that fled the base, both mine and the ones you oh-so-nicely scared off for me. We should be able to get some information out of them, but it would be really nice to have some files in case the grunts don’t know anything.”“I found Bucky.”The words are out before he was even aware he was going to say them. Bucky’s eyes snapped up, dark with anger and horror, and silence rang from the drone’s speaker.“He seems confused about some things, and he keeps talking about people I’ve never heard of like I should know them, but it’s him alright.” He met Bucky’s eyes as he spoke to Tony. Bucky was throwing up walls between them in fear (and oh god what could have made Bucky afraid of him?), but he couldn’t make himself take a step back. “They’ve done horrible things to him, Tony. I don’t know what yet, but I’m going to do my best to help him no matter what.”“Okay, you do that,” Tony said slowly. “That’s good. But how is that gonna fit into the whole retrieve key information on Hydra and then destroy this hellhole plan? Is that plan still on? ‘Cause I am in position for that plan, and that plan requires that you be walking slowly and clearly out of the west exit before too long and letting me give you a lift. If you’re abandoning that plan, now’s the time to tell me.”Steve reminded himself to care about the bigger picture. It was very difficult.“The plan’s still on. I’ll be out in time, don’t worry.”“Roger that.” The line hissed and went silent.Bucky stood frozen. The situation was balanced on a knife’s edge, and Bucky’s next action would determine which way it would all fall, but he wouldn’t move. His eyes were wild as a panicking dog’s, and his chest rose and fell too quickly.Then, suddenly, his knees gave out and he collapsed on the ground.Steve rushed to his side, only to be pushed away by a flailing arm.“Stay away! I don’t know who you are, or why you say you’re going to ‘help me,’ but you can’t. I’m sick, and I’m going to be sick for eternity.”“What are you talking about, Bucky? Here, let’s get you off the floor at least, you said that gunk on the floor was dangerous, right? You’re lying in it, that’s gotta be worse than just stepping in it.”He offered his hand again, and again Bucky batted it away.“They gave me a knock-off version of Stevie’s serum. Not as good as his, but it does what they wanted. I get sick, but the diseases never progress to death. I just cough and sneeze and throw up and turn colors and and get fevers that make me weak and hurt everywhere without ever dying of it.” He paused and coughed deeply. “They shoot me up with some new disease and then they take me somewhere I can infect people. It doesn’t matter where they take me, everyone else gets sick and dies and I keep on living.”He sucked in a deep, wet-sounding breath, then broke into another coughing fit, this one so strong his whole body shook with it. This time when Steve reached out to put a bracing hand on his back, he didn’t bat him away.“Hey, hey,” he said, rubbing small, smooth circles between Bucky’s too-prominent shoulder blades, “I know it’s been a long time, but it really is me. I was in cryo for a while too. I’ll tell you all about it later, okay, but you’ve gotta let me help you up so we can get out of here. Tony’s gonna wipe this base off the face of the mountain, but we’ve gotta get out of here first.”Bucky continued to cough for another minute before his chest finally stopped heaving.“Does this Tony have a way of keeping me from getting him sick?”“I’m pretty sure his suit has a bunch of fancy air-filtering and disinfectant, but we can ask him once we’re outside.”Steve curled and arm around Bucky’s emaciated side and hefted him far enough off the floor to get his feet under him. Before, he never would have managed it. Bucky had at least 80 pounds on him back when he first got those relocation papers. Now, his body felt like someone had taken great chunks out of it, then carefully smoothed his skin out to hide the decimation. His bones pressed hard against Steve’s arm, and his skin was far too warm for the freezing lab.Slowly, they made their way over to the door, Steve supporting Bucky, then up the stairs and through the foyer. They had to stop several times, and Steve ended up asking Tony to delay the explosion for a few minutes, but they kept going.When the castle exploded behind them, the flames drove away the lingering chill from their skin.The building was as isolated as you could get in a big city. A crackling, energized gate encircled the entire property, and a lush garden of trees and bushes formed a buffer between the building itself and the rest of the street. Tony strode right through the gate, and after a moment Steve followed him. He had to pull Bucky along a bit, but it didn’t seem like he was resisting.(It seemed more like a mild, conscious sort of catatonia, but Steve didn’t want to think about that.)“Everything is ready for you inside, but if I missed something let Jarvis know, he’ll hook you up,” Tony said. “Stay as long as you like. The only people other than you two with the authority to access this place are myself and my assistant Pepper Potts. You’ll love her, she’s great.”Inside, a sterile, minimalist foyer greeted them. Tony ushered them into the elevator, babbling the whole while about features and guidelines for them to keep in mind. Steve listened with half an ear, making mental notes of anything that sounded important.“Now, once Bucky here is feeling up to some medical treatment, we can start decreasing the number of plagues the Plaguebringer is hauling around. Do something for that cough, get a little blood work done, maybe keep him from accidentally meeting someone on the street and starting a horrific pandemic. Whatever. Just let me know.”Steve glanced at Bucky, but Bucky didn’t respond to Tony’s words at all.“Will do,” he said in Bucky’s place.Once Tony left and they were alone, he turned his full attention to Bucky. Bucky’s face was blank, but his hands were trembling and his skin was still the same deathly white it was when Steve first found him in the Hydra base, so he took him by the hand and dragged him over to the couch. Bucky sunk easily into the cushions under Steve’s insistent hands. It took Steve a few seconds to find where Tony kept the blankets, but once he did Bucky submitted to being wrapped in a blanket burrito.That was when things started to go wrong.“Don’t use that one, Stevie, it’s too nice,” Bucky said. For a second, a flash of the Bucky that worked at the spaceship docks and laughed in the light of the slime pits showed in his tone. Warmth bubbled up in Steve’s chest, only to abruptly disappear when he heard Bucky’s next words.“Only give me the ones you’re okay with burning.”“Bucky, what are you talking about? You deserve nice blankets. We’ve gotta keep you warm and comfortable, just like you kept me when I was sick.”“No Steve, you’ve gotta burn the blankets when I’m done with them. They’ll be infected with one of the millions of diseases I’m still sick with.”“It doesn’t matter, Buck, you can’t infect me with anything. That’s why I’m the one living here with you.” He tried to smile at the end, and make it into a joke. Of course the only reason he was living with Bucky was his immunity, not because they were lovers or life-long partners or anything like that.Bucky didn’t chime in on the joke, and Steve’s smile fell.“Look,” he tried again, “I don’t know what all happened to you while I was asleep in space. But it’s over now, and things can be good again. Tony’s going to help cure you of all those diseases you’re carrying around, and I’m gonna help you through the treatments until I can present you with a clean bill of health. Then you won’t be a danger to anyone, and we can restart our lives.”“It’s not gonna be like that, Steve,” Bucky muttered. “My body’s been full of rot and plague for so long I think my mind’s turned sick. And even if it wasn’t, there’s no starting over for me. Everyone’s looking for the Plaguebringer. Eventually someone’s gonna piece enough clues together to bring them to my doorstep. You keep saying it’s over, but it’s really not, not when that day hasn’t come yet.”Steve bit back a hundred arguments and protests. It burned him up not to argue, but if he did then he’d be drawn into a circular debate, and Bucky would stay improperly blanketed.“I’m still not burning the blankets,” he said, and dumped a particularly fluffy one into Bucky’s lap. Bucky gave Steve a flat look, but stayed helpfully still while he wrapped him up. He took it as a positive sign.Once the fluffy-to-Bucky ratio was maxed out and Bucky’s tense face had relaxed a few minute degrees, Steve cuddled up next to him and tried to think of something appropriate to say. There were about a million things he wanted to say, but they were heavy things, like stones on his tongue. Are we still together or has a hundred years as a prisoner of war put an end to all that? Will you stay with me, help me scrape together a life now that New Brooklyn is far behind us? What did Hydra do to you to make you turn down medical treatment? The things he couldn’t say piled up in his throat and choke him, and the silent stretched between them like yet another blanket, this one large enough to cover the entire couch. It got thicker and thicker, until no word Steve knew could cut through it. Bucky didn’t seem to mind, though, so he let it grow and tried to keep his worries and fears off his face.Time passed, though it was difficult to measure it without conversation or events. It seemed to slip right around them, leaving them untouched in this still, silent moment. At some point Bucky messed up Steve’s perfect blanket wrapping job to drape some of them over Steve’s shoulder, but he couldn’t have said if was after an hour or five minutes. It didn’t really matter.They stayed curled silently around each other until the light shining through the enormous windows became weak enough that Steve could no longer read the words on the cover of the robotics journal Tony had left on the coffee table. He rose from the warmth of Bucky’s embrace to brush his teeth and head to bed.“If you’re going to take a shower, you should do it now,” he called over his shoulder as he went. “If it gets much later you won’t want to, and then you’ll be grumpy with yourself in the morning when your hair’s still greasy.”Bucky grunted, but didn’t rise from his blanket pile.When Steve returned, he was still there. He’d retreated deep into the pile, so that the only indication that a human being was under all that fabric was the way the blankets moved slightly with his breathing.The sight left Steve somewhat flat-footed. He wanted to gently shake him awake, pull him down the hall with half of those blankets still hanging off his shoulders like overgrown moss from a nursery log to the bedroom with a bed big enough for four where Steve had already dumped what few things he had. He wanted to climb into bed like they had the night Bucky had gotten his relocation papers, curled around each other so that there was no escape from the other’s warmth. He wanted to try and see if they could have pillow talk again, to see if perhaps Bucky’s tongue would loosen in the dark, the way it sometimes had before. But, if Bucky really had managed to drift off into untroubled sleep, he also couldn’t bear to disturb him.His hands itched to reach out and cradle him to his chest and try to carry him to bed, but that was probably a bad idea. For a variety of reasons. But he was reluctant to turn away and go to bed alone. It felt like if they didn’t spend the first night together, it would set an unhappy precedent.
Space. Bucky might need some space. Or time. Or both.
The only thing worse than dragging Bucky to his room rather than inviting him and having that invitation accepted was an outright refusal, though. If Bucky said he didn’t want to share a bedroom anymore, that might break him. Which made him so angry his jaw drew tight as a drum and his teeth ached where they ground against each other. Bucky always had the right to refuse him. Choosing him, scrappy little Steve Rogers from New Brooklyn, had no meaning if refusal wasn’t an option. Besides, there were too many gaps in what he knew for him to get a clear read on what Bucky was thinking. A refusal for a night was by no means a refusal for always.It felt like a million invisible wires were pulling him first this way then that. Go to Bucky. Go to bed. Go to his seat on the couch. Walk out the front door and find something to do with himself until morning so he didn’t have to go to bed at all.At last, he sighed and slunk off to his room. He left the door open, and changed into his pajamas as slowly as he could without becoming ridiculous, and stayed on one side rather than sprawling across the middle. Not because he thought Bucky might join him later, or because he wanted him to know that he could join him later, when he awoke in his blanket nest and found that night had fallen in earnest. Just… because he was used to it. You liar, he thought. Dark thoughts descended upon Steve when he woke that morning to a cold, empty bed, and he fended them off with a spatula. He mixed pancake batter with the enthusiasm of a zealot performing a daily religious ritual, and only his own self-control stopped him from doing it so fast that it all ended up on the ceiling and dripping down the walls. He added blueberries imported from Earth and strange, genetically engineered purple peiberries to the batter to turn it a pleasing light violet color.It wasn’t quite the same as the way he’d made it back in New Brooklyn. They’d never been able to afford the ridiculous prices for fruit imported from outside their galaxy, so he’d used the thumb-sized, lilac colored Haoling’s berries from the vast, mechanically harvested farms far to the west of the city.He knew it didn’t really matter. Neither Haoling’s berries nor any of Tony Stark’s expensive imported fruit was strong enough to get fried with the batter and still overpower the other ingredients. It was the color that he added them for, and it was the color that Bucky would remember. But a small part of him still grumbled that his first proper breakfast and lazy morning with Bucky in a hundred years shouldn’t be anything less than perfect.He turned up the heat on the stove so the crackle and sizzle of rapidly melting butter and frying pancake would drown out his thoughts.Bucky hadn’t been on the couch when Steve had passed through the living room this morning. When he’d asked, Jarvis had said that he’d gone up on the roof to watch the sunrise. Seeing as Savezza’s too-hot sun had risen two hours ago, he decided to leave his lover to whatever thoughts were keeping him up there.
See, he could give Bucky space.
He thought about having Jarvis call him down for breakfast when he’d finished the first patch of pancakes, but something had stilled his tongue. Rather than examine the ache in his chest that barricaded his words in his lungs, he threw himself into making more pancakes. He’d call Bucky down when he had made enough, he told himself. They always used to make all the pancakes they were going to eat before they sat down together. Bucky always used to complain that there was no point to sitting down and trying to enjoy breakfast if he knew he was going to have to get up and start working again before he’d eaten his fill.He’d set out three plates on the table- one for him, one for Bucky, and one for overflow pancakes that he couldn’t balance on top of the stacks already heaped on the first two. As he added the most recent pan-load onto this third plate, he eyed the way the stack wobbled and wondered if he should get out a fourth plate.“Excuse me, Captain Rogers,” Jarvis said, syllables AI-smooth and perfectly polite, “are you going to be able to eat all of those pancakes, or are you planning to bring some to an event? If you plan to feed the entire neighborhood, I can order more batter and have it here within the half-hour.”“That’s fine, Jarvis,” he said. “Just want to make sure there’s enough for both of us.”The AI paused, as if searching for the correct words to point out Steve’s stupidity without being impolite.“Captain Rogers, Sir did remember to tell you that Sergeant Barnes’ stomach had likely shrunken considerably during his captivity?”“He did.”“And did he also remember to remind you that Sergeant Barnes is still sick with a variety of illnesses, and likely won’t be able to completely fill even his shrunken stomach without feeling ill?”Steve ground his teeth hard enough to send vibrations through the rest of his skull.“He did.”Another pause.“Shall I call Sergeant Barnes, then?”“Not yet.” He turned back to the stove and poured in another batch of batter circles. “We might need more.”He grabbed the batter bowl to add another dollop to the smallest pancake, only to find that the bowl was empty. With a frown he grabbed the extra large bag of pancake mix he’d found in the pantry that morning, only to find that it too was empty. That’s okay, he thought. I don’t need instant mix. I just need to find some flour. But when he strode back over to the pantry, muttering the list of ingredients he’d need to himself, Jarvis called out to him.“Captain Rogers, I feel I should tell you that there is no flour in the house. Sir’s last guest used it all up. If you would like me to place an order, I can have some delivered.”Steve stared at the ceiling in horror. They couldn’t be out of flour, he needed to make more pancakes before he called Bucky down for breakfast. He couldn’t ruin their first breakfast together since before everything went to hell. He couldn’t present Bucky with insufficient food after a night spent apart. He-Black smoke began to rise from the pan, and Jarvis helpfully informed him that if he didn’t attend to his pancakes soon, the fire alarm would go off.He managed to open a window and fan most of the smoke outside, but there was no saving the pancakes. The smell of burning and smoke filled the air, the pancakes were burnt, and he still couldn’t bring himself to call Bucky down for breakfast.His jaw twitched in barely-checked frustration.Okay. So his breakfast idea wasn’t going to work out, and was probably just an excuse to not go seek out Bucky anyway. Not seeking out Bucky was probably a bad thing. He should take the plate of pancakes he’d already prepared and take them up to him. They could eat on the roof, or wherever it was that Bucky had squirreled himself away.He tested one of the pancakes with his fingertip. Stone cold. He’d spent too much time making pancakes, and now they’d have to be microwaved if he wanted them hot enough.He would try again at lunch.When lunch time rolled around, Steve finally screwed up the courage to ask Jarvis to call Bucky down for lunch.After a brief pause, during which he was probably relaying the message to Bucky, Jarvis said “Unfortunately, Captain Rogers, it appears that Sergeant Barnes wishes to remain in the nest of couch blankets and pillows that he has constructed for himself in the upstairs bathroom.”“What if I made him another nest of blankets down here?”Another pause.“Sergeant Barnes says that it is unsanitary for him to be in the kitchen or near any sort of food preparation area.”“What if he wasn’t in the kitchen, exactly? I could make lunch, and he could watch.”Pause.“Sergeant Barnes says that he doesn’t want to eat a full meal, as it will make him sick to his stomach. One of his uncured diseases causes intense nausea and stomach cramping after eating more than a certain amount of food.”“What if we skipped lunch then, and I just made a light pie? He could pick out how big of a slice he thought he could eat.”Pause.“Sergeant Barnes will be down in half an hour. He wishes to clean himself thoroughly before approaching the kitchen. If I may, Captain, you may wish to provide a spot for Sergeant Barnes to sit or lie down. He is still quite weak, and I have yet to observe him standing for more than two or three minutes at a time.”Well, at least he was coming.Bucky stared at the bed. Steve had to admit, it did look a little strange sitting there in the middle of the spacious living room. It felt just a touch too exposed, too public. Bed’s were for private, personal quarters, not for rooms with floor-to-ceiling windows and enough chairs and couches to seat an entire army regiment. Even with all the other furniture pushed up against the walls to make as much space in the middle of the room as possible, the bed felt too big. Like he’d have to turn sideways to sidle past it if he wanted to visit the opulent bathroom down the hall.But the important thing was that it was within easy viewing distance of the kitchen, so Steve could work and talk to Bucky and Bucky could lay still and not have to stand or sit if he felt too weak.“There aren’t any straps?” Bucky whispered.“No straps,” Steve said firmly, pushing down his disgust and horror at the idea that Bucky would feel like he had to ask about something like that. “You can move around as much as you want.”Bucky nodded jerkily, but remained standing in that unnaturally still way of his, eyes trained on the bed. After a few seconds of awkward hovering, Steve shuffled into the kitchen and pointedly stopped looking at Bucky. Instead, he methodically pulled the ingredients for apple-and-tuufruit pie. (With Tony’s kitchen, he could actually make it with real apples rather than some other fruit substitute.)“You don’t have to worry, Buck, it’s over. Things will get better, even if it doesn’t seem like it now. We’ll figure it out.”He felt like hitting his head against the table. Here he was, spitting out platitudes like he was making a list. He needed to offer Bucky something real. But what? Bucky didn’t want to be touched or to touch anything himself, or to interact with people in any way, or to even move, but just staying stock still wasn’t an option either.“Do you remember our moms making pies, Buck? It was always such a special occasion, since Ma wouldn’t let me have anything she deemed unhealthy while I was ill. You were a lifesaver on that front. Somehow, chocolate-covered fruit slices always tasted sweeter coming from you.”He heard a shift, accompanied by a groan from the mattress springs.“We should make some, once I can get my hands on some chocolate that isn’t worth more than a whole week’s worth of your dock wages. Tony said we could help ourselves, but I just can’t stand to melt down such expensive chocolate. It feels like a sin.”Another shift. He bit into the inner skin of his lip to keep from looking up.“We can practice eating them together. You know I can’t catch anything anymore, so we can even share.”For the next several hours, he just talked as he worked. Even after he’d put the pie in the oven and there was no more real work to be done, he leaned against the counter and watched the timer tick steadily towards zero, chatting the whole time.He resolutely didn’t look at Bucky.The pie turned out well enough, so he cut it into thirds and handed one third to the robotic arm on wheels that occasionally brought things fro Tony. The robot beeped merrily at him and taken the plate after a quick scan. The text he received twenty minutes later was extremely complimentary, if a bit incoherent. Tony’s AI sent him another one a minute later, apologizing and explaining that Tony had not slept for more than an hour at a time since intercepting Steve’s spaceship.Steve was going to have to address this thing between him and Tony at some point. Clearly it was having a bigger effect on the man than he’d thought.He put another third of the pie on a star-print plate and set it on a section of the bed that wasn’t taken up by Bucky’s starfish impression. He very carefully didn’t let his eyes linger on his malnourished body. Bucky squirmed a little under his gaze anyway, though he could tell he was trying to lie still.The third piece of pie he ate out of the pie tin, perched awkwardly on one corner of the bed, facing away. It was a good thing he was still so small.He ate slowly and methodically, holding a one-sided conversation about any topic that came to mind, but his words and his pie ran out before Bucky’s silence did, so he ended up just sitting there, breathing deeply, evenly, and loudly, the way he never could before the Serum, so Bucky would be able to hear it.“So,” he said when to last crumb of pie was gone and it didn’t sound like Bucky was chewing anymore, “Treatments.”“Not today, Steve,” Bucky said. Twin thunks indicated Bucky swinging his feet out of bed. “I can’t think about getting better today.”His footsteps grew quieter and quieter as he left the room.The next day the bed had new sheets and blankets. Bucky blanched when he saw them, but Steve walked right past him into the kitchen and started making another pie before Bucky could start protesting.Two hours in, Bucky finally spoke.“I’m gonna get fat if your idea of therapy is baking me pie every day.”Steve hummed. “Maybe so, but have you looked in a mirror recently? You could use a little fattening up.”Had Bucky not asked him specifically to keep him isolated, where he couldn’t infect any more people, Steve would have taken him to the nearest quarantine hospital and demanded he be put on every nutritional supplement and emergency weight gain mixtures they had. Bucky’s frame was large enough to hide the effects of illnesses and malnutrition from a first glance, but a second look revealed a body that had shrunken around that frame. His muscles were too-visible, like his skin had turned to shrink-wrap that might burst at any second. It had gotten a little better since they’d arrived here, but Bucky was still clearly dehydrated. His face was hauntingly gaunt, and the bones in his hands were too easy to make out.Bucky grumbled, but like yesterday he laid on the bed and let Steve talk to him as he cooked, and he ate the pie when it was done. He tried to convince Steve to burn the blankets afterwards, but Steve talked him down from it easily enough. He still didn’t want to even talk about starting treatment, but It was progress.Or so he’d thought.At three AM that night, the fire alarm went off, yanking Steve from his sleep. He flailed around wildly, his body instinctively trying to seek out Bucky but finding nothing but sheets and air. Heart pounding, he leaped out of bed and began jogging down the hall, looking for some sign of Bucky’s presence. But no matter where he looked, there was no one.There was no smoke in the halls, and when he tested them none of the doors he passed were hot to the touch. After a few seconds of frantic fumbling, the fire alarm cut out, leaving him standing in silence.“Jarvis!” he called. “Are you still online? What happened to the alarms?”“Good morning, Captain Rogers,” Stark’s AI robot said. “I cancelled the alarm, as I judged that the fire was not currently a danger to the building or residents. I will continue to monitor the situation, of course.”“Where’s the fire, and where’s Bucky?” he asked.The AI went quiet for a second.“My apologies for the delay, Captain. As per the privacy settings you requested, I only passively monitor yours and Sergeant Barnes’ locations within the building until I am called upon. I required a second to review the footage. The fire is on the roof, and is in little danger of spreading to the rest of the house. Sergeant Barnes appears to be carefully and methodically burning a pile of blankets taken from the bed you set up earlier today near the kitchen counter. He has several fire extinguishers on hand, as well as a hose.”“I see.”Perhaps it had been a little too easy to talk Bucky out of burning the blankets.“Thank you, Jarvis. I’ll go talk to him.”“Of course, Captain. Good luck.”Slowly, Steve climbed the stairs to the roof of the building. There was an elevator, but he wanted to feel the light burn in his calves and the back of his thighs from climbing the stairs instead. It made him feel more purposeful, like he was headed somewhere and working a bit to get there. It helped balance out the feeling of directionlessness and guilt, and the last thing he needed to do right now was burden Bucky with that.The roof was warm when he stepped out into the light nighttime breeze. Bucky didn’t turn around when he opened and closed the door to the stairs, or visibly react to the sound of his steadily approaching footsteps. His eyes were trained on the blazing blankets and sheets.Steve sank down onto the roof next to him and tried to radiate support without actually saying anything. He tried to think of something to talk about, but nothing sounded right, or the words died in his throat before he could bring himself to actually say them. He’d read somewhere that dogs could have a loving, supportive presence, that therapy dogs actually were trained to have one. If a dog could do it, so could he.“Hey,” he said, and gestured at the fire. “Feeling any warmer?”He immediately cringed inside. Whatever the right words were, those weren’t them.“No,” Bucky said dejectedly.Steve didn’t really have a response to that.“Is there a reason you don’t want to get treated?”Those weren’t the right words either. They felt too heavy, to direct, like an enormous boulder had rolled off his tongue and was now crushing the both of them.“I’ve been sick forever, Steve,” Bucky sighed.It seemed even if he couldn’t find the right words, just saying something would get at least a few words worth of response. Gritting his teeth and wishing it was easier to be both comforting and contrary, Steve blundered on.“And now you have the chance to not be sick. Isn’t that something you want?”“I don’t think I know how to want it, Steve. It’s like saying ‘don’t you want to go out there and fly? Oh, I promise, they’ve made these great engineered wings they can slap right onto your back muscles, it’s super simple.’ Flying is one of those idle dreams, not one of the ones you actually reach for.”“Airplanes and spaceships have been around for a long time, Bucky,” he said.“Bad metaphor, then.”Bucky’s jaw worked, like he was chewing on his words to try and make them softer and easier to swallow.“Steve, it just feels so big. They gave me so many diseases when I was conscious, and I don’t have a clue how many they shot be up with when I wasn’t. There’s no end to it. And even if there was, shouldn’t I be made to suffer a little? They don’t call me Plaguebringer for nothing. Every time I close my eyes I see all those people I passed on the street, drugged out of my mind and too loose-limbed to get away from whatever Hydra agent was dragging me around, and I know that they all died, just because they drank from the same water sourced I drank from or because I was coughing too close to them. I was like an extinction event, Stevie.”Steve tried to hold back from hugging him, but he didn’t have that kind of strength. Bucky grunted a little when he pulled him back against his chest, but he didn’t fight it.“Bucky, listen. You suffering won’t bring any of those people back-”“Oh don’t come at me with that, Stevie. Are you telling me that you wouldn’t like to see those Hydra agents who shot me up with those diseases in the first place be made to suffer? Did you feel bad about killing some of them when you raided the base?”“But they hurt you. They made you suffer.” Steve could hear the desperation in his own voice, but he couldn’t turn it off.“And I made millions of others suffer. You don’t get to say I shouldn’t suffer for what I did when you clearly want them to suffer for what they did.”They sat in silence while Steve tried to think of an argument that wouldn’t flounder on the waves of Bucky’s apathy and depression. The fire crackled merrily in front of them as the blankets burned to ash.“Do you want to hurt more people?” Steve finally asked.“Of course not!” Bucky snapped.“Then you should go get treated, so you don’t accidentally infect someone else.”“For how long, Stevie? I can’t just get better in a week, and the whole time I’m trying to get better I’ll be risking the lives of anyone who tries to help me aside from you. There will always be another thing I need to get better from, and it will never end. Wouldn’t it be better if I just laid down and died?”Steve squeezed him harder, hard enough to feel those prominent ribs creak.“Never say that. ‘Lie down and die’ is never the answer. So maybe treatment will take a long time. I didn’t say it wouldn’t. But you’re worth at least trying, Buck. I don’t care if I have to give you every shot myself and force every pill down your mouth by hand, if you don’t want to endanger a doctor you don’t have to. But please, don’t just give up.”Bucky slumped against him.“I don’t even know how to start,” he said, and triumph tasted so wonderful.“With the first treatment,” he said, trying to sound serious and not like he wanted to kiss Bucky until the sun rose. “We’ll call up Tony in the morning, tell him you’re ready to get started.”“I’m still gonna burn the blankets,” Bucky mumbled. “Until I’m cured, I gonna keep burning them. And not drinking over the sink. And staying inside. And all those other things you think I shouldn’t do.”“So long as you’re getting treatment, I can accept that.”Bucky grabbed one of the fire extinguishers sitting a little ways away and sprayed the fire. Almost immediately the foam smothered the fire, leaving the two of them in the darkness of the Savezza night.“Come on, let’s go back to bed,” Steve said. He tugged Bucky towards where he thought the door was, not bothering to wait for his eyes to adjust.“If I sleep with you, will you get pissy at me when I burn your sheets?” Bucky asked, and Steve felt like jumping for joy.“How about we negotiate in the morning?” He said instead.“Sure thing, pal.”