CA:TWS fic: Leviticus 25
Leviticus 25
3000 words | PG-ish | Steve Rogers, Sam Wilson, (Bucky Barnes)
"You want to save Bucky Barnes? You are going to have to put your own house in order first because he is going to need a rock to cling to. You are not ready to be that rock for him. You owe it to him -- and more importantly, you owe it to yourself -- to figure things out, figure out how you can be happy in this time and place, whether or not Barnes is with you."
Steve took his continued convalescence in the hospital -- super soldier serum or not, gunshot wounds and broken bones were gunshot wounds and broken bones and did not heal in 48 hours -- with bemused impatience. For almost all of his life, he'd been a prisoner of his frail body and its limitations and yet here he was getting testy at being held under observation after having survived a series of events that no mortal man should have lived through, let alone the mortal man he'd been.
It was a bemusement that faded when he thought about why he'd been in that spot in the first place and why he'd survived it at all. Which might have ultimately been the same reason. He had no proof that Bucky had saved him after he'd fallen from the Helicarrier, but someone had and there weren't any more obvious options. His fall-related injuries were consistent with a water landing and someone had dragged him to shore and cleared the water out of his lungs; he hadn't been in the water long, he'd been told, and showed no signs of extended oxygen deprivation. Whoever saved him had seen him fall.
Natasha had been willing to accept it was Bucky all along, although she insisted upon calling him the Winter Soldier because her credulousness did not extend to Bucky breaking free of his brainwashing. Even Sam was starting to believe, although he did not confess so much in words, just that he stopped making scoffing noises whenever anyone else brought it up. And then there were the books.
"What are these?" Steve asked as Sam dropped four books on the over-bed table. Sam had taken advantage of his captive audience (his choice of words) to work on Steve's pop culture lacuna, bringing in books and DVDs and flash drives full of music to be played on the laptop Natasha had acquired ("yes, legally!") for him after his had disappeared from his apartment. They were from his personal collection, mostly, although some of the books came from the church one of his support groups used as a meeting place.
"You're gonna need these," Sam said as he sat down and he wasn't smiling, wasn't wearing the impish grin he could never hide when he couldn't wait to see Steve's reaction to whatever it was he'd brought. He was, Steve realized, bracing for a fight.
Steve picked up the first book, which was a guidebook to living with and overcoming post-traumatic stress disorder, and frowned. "I got all these when I woke up," he said evenly.
"And you promptly threw them away," Sam asked, not making it sound like a question. "'Cuz I know you didn't register anything in them."
Steve took a deep breath and did not frown. "I didn't think that they applied. There wasn't anything wrong with my head that couldn't have been explained by getting tossed seventy years into the future."
Sam growled. "Ain't nothing wrong with anyone's head," he said, an edge of humor cutting the sharpness. He leaned forward so that his elbows rested on his knees. "You go through bad shit, it fucks you up. You went through bad shit, you got ready to die, and then woke up on what might as well be another planet. How the hell SHIELD let you just wander around without locking you in a room with a therapist trained to deal with combat vets, I will never know. Although seeing as they were being run by HYDRA and the parts that weren't run by HYDRA were run by Nick Fury, I should maybe be less surprised than I am."
Steve gave him a weak smile because he knew Sam well enough by now to see the root of his frustration, how much of it was sympathy and how much of it was the same urge to make things better where he could, person by person if he had to, that burned in himself.
"Look," Sam began again with a sigh, letting his head drop down for a moment and then picking it up and looking at him again. "I know admitting that there's a problem wasn't what people did when you were in your own time. I also know that you're not really post-anything. You haven't been off the battlefield since 1943 and the fact that you're functioning at a pretty damned high level is nothing short of a miracle and it's got nothing to do with what's in your veins. But I also know that you're not happy. And the things that you were clinging to to distract yourself from noticing it all the time just got taken away from you -- and that's without your best friend coming back from the dead to try to kill you.
"You want to save Bucky Barnes? You are going to have to put your own house in order first because he is going to need a rock to cling to. You are not ready to be that rock for him. You owe it to him -- and more importantly, you owe it to yourself -- to figure things out, figure out how you can be happy in this time and place, whether or not Barnes is with you."
Steve looked up from where he'd been staring at the book's cover. "I don't think I can wait for that," he said, not pretending he hadn't heard the rest of it. "I don't think Bucky can wait for that."
That he was still treating the twenty-first century as a kind of forced but temporary relocation, like the London children shuttled off to the countryside to wait out the war, had not escaped him. He had adapted to the future, but he had not assimilated, he had learned the language and the technology and how to pass as a native without ever becoming one in his heart. Undoing all of that, accepting where and when he was and what it meant -- the potential of what he could gain instead of just the magnitude of the loss -- would take more time than he could give it while Bucky was still at large.
"Bucky's not breaking in here to see you," Sam pointed out, not unkindly. "He's also not breaking in to kill you, so take the good with the bad there. But I'm not saying you need to present him with a masterpiece, a finished Rock of Gibraltar. You just need to be on the way. You can be under construction. Hell, man, we're all of us under construction. All the time."
The conversation was abruptly ended by the arrival of a pair of nurses wheeling in the portable x-ray; in addition to the patched hole in his abdomen and a spectacular collection of cuts and contusions, he also had four broken ribs, which had required surgery, and a crack in his left scapula that required nothing more than a high pain threshold and care that he could not promise to provide once he left the hospital.
"I'll come back later," Sam said, eying the machine with its radiation exposure warnings. "I plan on there being little Wilsons someday."
Steve laughingly called him a coward as he fled, even as the lead blanket was being positioned to preserve the chance at future Rogerses, which he'd privately assumed he'd never have because he would either die on a battlefield or live out his life in exile. The x-rays were unremarkable except that the coughing fit he'd had that morning from not elevating enough to drink water hadn't jarred anything loose.
It was only after Arvin and Cathy were gone again that Steve looked at the other books Sam had brought. Two of them were autobiographies, memoirs of soldiers, one of a POW in Vietnam and one of a veteran of the more recent conflicts. The fourth was another PTSD guide, but one meant for the loved ones of a sufferer and that one he set aside for now even as he appreciated Sam's foresight and quiet declaration that he'd come around to Steve's belief that Bucky was alive and, at least partially, himself.
"We've been fighting for a dozen years," Sam said with a shrug when Steve asked about it when he came back in the evening with beef larb and som tum and a couple of noodle dishes and most of a curried fish because it turned out Thai food was really good. "We've gotten a chance, for good or for ill, to see what that does to those in uniform and their families."
The memoirs, he went on to explain, would possibly be useful for different reasons. The more recent one was a book many in his group had read and felt really spoke to their situations without going the victim route or making their experiences sound like a crazy person's. "Dignity's important in all this," Sam reminded him, not for the first time. The second one was a harsh read, Sam warned, and not one he gave over lightly because it contained visceral firsthand descriptions of torture suffered at the hands of the Vietcong. "It's the closest thing I could think of for preparing you for what it might be like with Barnes."
Steve smiled sadly. "I already know what he's like after torture," he said ruefully, thinking back to those horrible, crazy days. "I pulled him off a HYDRA lab table in Italy and he hadn't just laid down on it. But we never talked about it. He didn't want to and I didn't want to force him to... to list all the ways he'd been broken."
He sometimes wondered if he should have done more, but most of the time he was honest enough with himself to realize that Bucky wouldn't have accepted more and that he himself hadn't been in much of a position to offer more than he did. In the span of twenty-four hours he'd gone from being a showgirl and finding out Bucky was missing/captured to going AWOL and breaking into a HYDRA base to finding Bucky to having to lead almost four hundred POWs back to friendly lines without any idea what he was doing. He'd kept Bucky at his side the entire trek south, first because Bucky couldn't stand on his own and then because Bucky wouldn't leave him, and while he'd registered the changes, he'd had so much else to worry about that he'd accepted Bucky's assurances that he was fine. There were so many in worse shape, at least physically, and what went on between a man's ears was his own business.
Later on, once the bruises had faded and the weight regained, they had had so much else new between them... they'd had to negotiate a new them in a world at war, a world Bucky would have happily died in to keep Steve from ever seeing, but it turned out that Steve was now built for the battlefield and it was Bucky who was the vulnerable one. It never broke them, never came close, but Steve had always known that Bucky never quite stopped worrying that it would, worrying that the reversal of their relative physical strength had rendered him unnecessary, that whatever had been broken within him during his captivity would come to be seen as a burden. As if he'd forgotten that Steve hadn't chosen to spend almost all of his life with him because he had a good right cross, that Steve had still needed protection in so many other ways. It wasn't anything Bucky'd ever said out loud, but Steve could read it in his actions even if no one else could, the need to show he belonged in Captain America's orbit as much as he had in Steve Rogers's. It was one of the reasons Steve had felt so much guilt after Bucky's death.. "death." He should have told Bucky that there wasn't anything he needed to prove, not to him and not to anyone else; it had been as clear as day that Steve had never stopped needing him, never lost the instinct of turning to Bucky first. It was something he very much wanted to say to Bucky now, whatever his reasons were for staying away, since he didn't think for a moment that the guards outside his door had a thing to do with it.
"Don't know if it woulda done either of you any good," Sam told him gently. "Whether it will now, what he's been though since... I suppose we wait and see what kind of shape he's in when we find him."
Sam always used the plural when it came to talking about looking for Bucky, even before he'd gone so far as to admit that there was a Bucky to be sought, and Steve was grateful for that. He understood that all that Sam had done so far was for more reasons than answering the call of Captain America, if that had ever actually been a reason (Steve suspected it was). Natasha had said that it was because Sam couldn't save his own friend, so he was saving other people's friends and Steve didn't disagree, but he thought it was more than that, more than the adrenaline rush, more than getting to wear the Falcon wings one more time. At some point down the line Sam would explain or he wouldn't, but either way, Steve knew he had an ally, a friend, at a time when he didn't have much else.
"Wish we had more to go on," he said as Sam cut more of the fish away from the bone and served it to both of their plates. "I don't know whether or not to be relieved that there wasn't anything in our files on him, whether seeing his own face in the paper would have brought him closer or made him run."
There'd been absolutely nothing on Bucky Barnes in the collected archives of HYDRA and SHIELD that Natasha had dumped into the public sphere, not a single reference anywhere; the top returns on a google search of his name that were related to him were still his Wikipedia page, the public school in Brooklyn named after him (Steve had never missed him more than when he'd found out that Bucky, never the most excited student, had had a middle school named after him), and pictures of Montgomery Clift, who'd played Bucky in the first Captain America biopic.
There were references to the Winter Soldier in the released SHIELD files, but they were all half apocryphal even if they were all true: stories like the one Natasha had told him of her mission to Odessa, repeated with ever-more brutal variations by a handful of other agents or, in the cases where the agents had been killed, other voices. A ghost, no description that matched from telling to telling, no limit to his skills or capacity, no limit to his lifespan because the stories went back decades. There was nothing in HYDRA's share of the disclosures, either, at least nothing so overt; there were references to an asset never named that could be matched, in a few circumstances, to SHIELD case files. But that was it; wherever HYDRA had hidden the paper trail that ran from Alexander Pierce to Armin Zola that would connect Bucky Barnes to anything, that had not been anywhere Natasha had been able to reach. Which in turn was not a complete surprise; a lot of Pierce's personal HYDRA files were missing and Pierce would have been careful enough to not leave breadcrumbs like that, no matter how arrogant he was about everything else.
"Wherever he is, I don't think he's gonna stay hidden for too long," Sam said as he gestured for Steve to push his plate closer so he could put more noodles on it. "He might've been a ghost when HYDRA was hiding him, but they cast a much smaller shadow now and he might have a very different view of their shade these days."
Natasha had been the first to suggest that the easiest way to find Bucky might end up being to follow the river of blood as he took revenge on those who'd hurt him, who'd stolen his memories and his free will and his entire self and used what was left for their own purposes. Steve hoped this wasn't the case, not because he didn't think some measure of revenge was worthwhile or proper, but instead that he didn't think that it would help Bucky heal, would do anything to fill in the chasm between him and the rest of the world. Steve's own moat around his heart wasn't as deep or wide, wasn't from waking up from a nightmare (he'd woken up into a nightmare, instead), and he had had nobody to blame but himself and maybe Johann Schmidt for what had happened. But he still understood the sheer distance of that chasm, the delay between what the world was doing and what was registering in his own head, and he knew that lashing out, be it destroying a heavy bag or killing an old torturer, didn't help. It didn't make that endless, burning hurt ache any less.
That said, he wouldn't necessarily be surprised if that's what it turned out to be, blood drops instead of a breadcrumbs that led them back to each other. Bucky had always had a... bit of Old Testament to him.
"Right now, I just hope he's safe," Steve said, sliding the full plate back toward him. He'd put his arm in the sling, part of the compromise with the doctors, so he had to arrange the plate with his free hand before picking up the fork, which Sam had buried in noodles. "I can't look after him from here and he's got nobody else right now."
"Dude's a survivor," Sam replied as he leaned back with his own plate. "He'll survive for a while until we can get him to believe there's more to life than that. You two can race to that milestone, two old dudes with your hearing aids and your dentures and your three-minute miles."
Steve laughed, then got a sharp reminder in his broken ribs that he shouldn't just yet.
Soon, though, maybe.
Also posted at DW.
3000 words | PG-ish | Steve Rogers, Sam Wilson, (Bucky Barnes)
"You want to save Bucky Barnes? You are going to have to put your own house in order first because he is going to need a rock to cling to. You are not ready to be that rock for him. You owe it to him -- and more importantly, you owe it to yourself -- to figure things out, figure out how you can be happy in this time and place, whether or not Barnes is with you."
Steve took his continued convalescence in the hospital -- super soldier serum or not, gunshot wounds and broken bones were gunshot wounds and broken bones and did not heal in 48 hours -- with bemused impatience. For almost all of his life, he'd been a prisoner of his frail body and its limitations and yet here he was getting testy at being held under observation after having survived a series of events that no mortal man should have lived through, let alone the mortal man he'd been.
It was a bemusement that faded when he thought about why he'd been in that spot in the first place and why he'd survived it at all. Which might have ultimately been the same reason. He had no proof that Bucky had saved him after he'd fallen from the Helicarrier, but someone had and there weren't any more obvious options. His fall-related injuries were consistent with a water landing and someone had dragged him to shore and cleared the water out of his lungs; he hadn't been in the water long, he'd been told, and showed no signs of extended oxygen deprivation. Whoever saved him had seen him fall.
Natasha had been willing to accept it was Bucky all along, although she insisted upon calling him the Winter Soldier because her credulousness did not extend to Bucky breaking free of his brainwashing. Even Sam was starting to believe, although he did not confess so much in words, just that he stopped making scoffing noises whenever anyone else brought it up. And then there were the books.
"What are these?" Steve asked as Sam dropped four books on the over-bed table. Sam had taken advantage of his captive audience (his choice of words) to work on Steve's pop culture lacuna, bringing in books and DVDs and flash drives full of music to be played on the laptop Natasha had acquired ("yes, legally!") for him after his had disappeared from his apartment. They were from his personal collection, mostly, although some of the books came from the church one of his support groups used as a meeting place.
"You're gonna need these," Sam said as he sat down and he wasn't smiling, wasn't wearing the impish grin he could never hide when he couldn't wait to see Steve's reaction to whatever it was he'd brought. He was, Steve realized, bracing for a fight.
Steve picked up the first book, which was a guidebook to living with and overcoming post-traumatic stress disorder, and frowned. "I got all these when I woke up," he said evenly.
"And you promptly threw them away," Sam asked, not making it sound like a question. "'Cuz I know you didn't register anything in them."
Steve took a deep breath and did not frown. "I didn't think that they applied. There wasn't anything wrong with my head that couldn't have been explained by getting tossed seventy years into the future."
Sam growled. "Ain't nothing wrong with anyone's head," he said, an edge of humor cutting the sharpness. He leaned forward so that his elbows rested on his knees. "You go through bad shit, it fucks you up. You went through bad shit, you got ready to die, and then woke up on what might as well be another planet. How the hell SHIELD let you just wander around without locking you in a room with a therapist trained to deal with combat vets, I will never know. Although seeing as they were being run by HYDRA and the parts that weren't run by HYDRA were run by Nick Fury, I should maybe be less surprised than I am."
Steve gave him a weak smile because he knew Sam well enough by now to see the root of his frustration, how much of it was sympathy and how much of it was the same urge to make things better where he could, person by person if he had to, that burned in himself.
"Look," Sam began again with a sigh, letting his head drop down for a moment and then picking it up and looking at him again. "I know admitting that there's a problem wasn't what people did when you were in your own time. I also know that you're not really post-anything. You haven't been off the battlefield since 1943 and the fact that you're functioning at a pretty damned high level is nothing short of a miracle and it's got nothing to do with what's in your veins. But I also know that you're not happy. And the things that you were clinging to to distract yourself from noticing it all the time just got taken away from you -- and that's without your best friend coming back from the dead to try to kill you.
"You want to save Bucky Barnes? You are going to have to put your own house in order first because he is going to need a rock to cling to. You are not ready to be that rock for him. You owe it to him -- and more importantly, you owe it to yourself -- to figure things out, figure out how you can be happy in this time and place, whether or not Barnes is with you."
Steve looked up from where he'd been staring at the book's cover. "I don't think I can wait for that," he said, not pretending he hadn't heard the rest of it. "I don't think Bucky can wait for that."
That he was still treating the twenty-first century as a kind of forced but temporary relocation, like the London children shuttled off to the countryside to wait out the war, had not escaped him. He had adapted to the future, but he had not assimilated, he had learned the language and the technology and how to pass as a native without ever becoming one in his heart. Undoing all of that, accepting where and when he was and what it meant -- the potential of what he could gain instead of just the magnitude of the loss -- would take more time than he could give it while Bucky was still at large.
"Bucky's not breaking in here to see you," Sam pointed out, not unkindly. "He's also not breaking in to kill you, so take the good with the bad there. But I'm not saying you need to present him with a masterpiece, a finished Rock of Gibraltar. You just need to be on the way. You can be under construction. Hell, man, we're all of us under construction. All the time."
The conversation was abruptly ended by the arrival of a pair of nurses wheeling in the portable x-ray; in addition to the patched hole in his abdomen and a spectacular collection of cuts and contusions, he also had four broken ribs, which had required surgery, and a crack in his left scapula that required nothing more than a high pain threshold and care that he could not promise to provide once he left the hospital.
"I'll come back later," Sam said, eying the machine with its radiation exposure warnings. "I plan on there being little Wilsons someday."
Steve laughingly called him a coward as he fled, even as the lead blanket was being positioned to preserve the chance at future Rogerses, which he'd privately assumed he'd never have because he would either die on a battlefield or live out his life in exile. The x-rays were unremarkable except that the coughing fit he'd had that morning from not elevating enough to drink water hadn't jarred anything loose.
It was only after Arvin and Cathy were gone again that Steve looked at the other books Sam had brought. Two of them were autobiographies, memoirs of soldiers, one of a POW in Vietnam and one of a veteran of the more recent conflicts. The fourth was another PTSD guide, but one meant for the loved ones of a sufferer and that one he set aside for now even as he appreciated Sam's foresight and quiet declaration that he'd come around to Steve's belief that Bucky was alive and, at least partially, himself.
"We've been fighting for a dozen years," Sam said with a shrug when Steve asked about it when he came back in the evening with beef larb and som tum and a couple of noodle dishes and most of a curried fish because it turned out Thai food was really good. "We've gotten a chance, for good or for ill, to see what that does to those in uniform and their families."
The memoirs, he went on to explain, would possibly be useful for different reasons. The more recent one was a book many in his group had read and felt really spoke to their situations without going the victim route or making their experiences sound like a crazy person's. "Dignity's important in all this," Sam reminded him, not for the first time. The second one was a harsh read, Sam warned, and not one he gave over lightly because it contained visceral firsthand descriptions of torture suffered at the hands of the Vietcong. "It's the closest thing I could think of for preparing you for what it might be like with Barnes."
Steve smiled sadly. "I already know what he's like after torture," he said ruefully, thinking back to those horrible, crazy days. "I pulled him off a HYDRA lab table in Italy and he hadn't just laid down on it. But we never talked about it. He didn't want to and I didn't want to force him to... to list all the ways he'd been broken."
He sometimes wondered if he should have done more, but most of the time he was honest enough with himself to realize that Bucky wouldn't have accepted more and that he himself hadn't been in much of a position to offer more than he did. In the span of twenty-four hours he'd gone from being a showgirl and finding out Bucky was missing/captured to going AWOL and breaking into a HYDRA base to finding Bucky to having to lead almost four hundred POWs back to friendly lines without any idea what he was doing. He'd kept Bucky at his side the entire trek south, first because Bucky couldn't stand on his own and then because Bucky wouldn't leave him, and while he'd registered the changes, he'd had so much else to worry about that he'd accepted Bucky's assurances that he was fine. There were so many in worse shape, at least physically, and what went on between a man's ears was his own business.
Later on, once the bruises had faded and the weight regained, they had had so much else new between them... they'd had to negotiate a new them in a world at war, a world Bucky would have happily died in to keep Steve from ever seeing, but it turned out that Steve was now built for the battlefield and it was Bucky who was the vulnerable one. It never broke them, never came close, but Steve had always known that Bucky never quite stopped worrying that it would, worrying that the reversal of their relative physical strength had rendered him unnecessary, that whatever had been broken within him during his captivity would come to be seen as a burden. As if he'd forgotten that Steve hadn't chosen to spend almost all of his life with him because he had a good right cross, that Steve had still needed protection in so many other ways. It wasn't anything Bucky'd ever said out loud, but Steve could read it in his actions even if no one else could, the need to show he belonged in Captain America's orbit as much as he had in Steve Rogers's. It was one of the reasons Steve had felt so much guilt after Bucky's death.. "death." He should have told Bucky that there wasn't anything he needed to prove, not to him and not to anyone else; it had been as clear as day that Steve had never stopped needing him, never lost the instinct of turning to Bucky first. It was something he very much wanted to say to Bucky now, whatever his reasons were for staying away, since he didn't think for a moment that the guards outside his door had a thing to do with it.
"Don't know if it woulda done either of you any good," Sam told him gently. "Whether it will now, what he's been though since... I suppose we wait and see what kind of shape he's in when we find him."
Sam always used the plural when it came to talking about looking for Bucky, even before he'd gone so far as to admit that there was a Bucky to be sought, and Steve was grateful for that. He understood that all that Sam had done so far was for more reasons than answering the call of Captain America, if that had ever actually been a reason (Steve suspected it was). Natasha had said that it was because Sam couldn't save his own friend, so he was saving other people's friends and Steve didn't disagree, but he thought it was more than that, more than the adrenaline rush, more than getting to wear the Falcon wings one more time. At some point down the line Sam would explain or he wouldn't, but either way, Steve knew he had an ally, a friend, at a time when he didn't have much else.
"Wish we had more to go on," he said as Sam cut more of the fish away from the bone and served it to both of their plates. "I don't know whether or not to be relieved that there wasn't anything in our files on him, whether seeing his own face in the paper would have brought him closer or made him run."
There'd been absolutely nothing on Bucky Barnes in the collected archives of HYDRA and SHIELD that Natasha had dumped into the public sphere, not a single reference anywhere; the top returns on a google search of his name that were related to him were still his Wikipedia page, the public school in Brooklyn named after him (Steve had never missed him more than when he'd found out that Bucky, never the most excited student, had had a middle school named after him), and pictures of Montgomery Clift, who'd played Bucky in the first Captain America biopic.
There were references to the Winter Soldier in the released SHIELD files, but they were all half apocryphal even if they were all true: stories like the one Natasha had told him of her mission to Odessa, repeated with ever-more brutal variations by a handful of other agents or, in the cases where the agents had been killed, other voices. A ghost, no description that matched from telling to telling, no limit to his skills or capacity, no limit to his lifespan because the stories went back decades. There was nothing in HYDRA's share of the disclosures, either, at least nothing so overt; there were references to an asset never named that could be matched, in a few circumstances, to SHIELD case files. But that was it; wherever HYDRA had hidden the paper trail that ran from Alexander Pierce to Armin Zola that would connect Bucky Barnes to anything, that had not been anywhere Natasha had been able to reach. Which in turn was not a complete surprise; a lot of Pierce's personal HYDRA files were missing and Pierce would have been careful enough to not leave breadcrumbs like that, no matter how arrogant he was about everything else.
"Wherever he is, I don't think he's gonna stay hidden for too long," Sam said as he gestured for Steve to push his plate closer so he could put more noodles on it. "He might've been a ghost when HYDRA was hiding him, but they cast a much smaller shadow now and he might have a very different view of their shade these days."
Natasha had been the first to suggest that the easiest way to find Bucky might end up being to follow the river of blood as he took revenge on those who'd hurt him, who'd stolen his memories and his free will and his entire self and used what was left for their own purposes. Steve hoped this wasn't the case, not because he didn't think some measure of revenge was worthwhile or proper, but instead that he didn't think that it would help Bucky heal, would do anything to fill in the chasm between him and the rest of the world. Steve's own moat around his heart wasn't as deep or wide, wasn't from waking up from a nightmare (he'd woken up into a nightmare, instead), and he had had nobody to blame but himself and maybe Johann Schmidt for what had happened. But he still understood the sheer distance of that chasm, the delay between what the world was doing and what was registering in his own head, and he knew that lashing out, be it destroying a heavy bag or killing an old torturer, didn't help. It didn't make that endless, burning hurt ache any less.
That said, he wouldn't necessarily be surprised if that's what it turned out to be, blood drops instead of a breadcrumbs that led them back to each other. Bucky had always had a... bit of Old Testament to him.
"Right now, I just hope he's safe," Steve said, sliding the full plate back toward him. He'd put his arm in the sling, part of the compromise with the doctors, so he had to arrange the plate with his free hand before picking up the fork, which Sam had buried in noodles. "I can't look after him from here and he's got nobody else right now."
"Dude's a survivor," Sam replied as he leaned back with his own plate. "He'll survive for a while until we can get him to believe there's more to life than that. You two can race to that milestone, two old dudes with your hearing aids and your dentures and your three-minute miles."
Steve laughed, then got a sharp reminder in his broken ribs that he shouldn't just yet.
Soon, though, maybe.
Also posted at DW.