Chapter Text
Maybe six, seven more miles? Maybe more. He's tired, and his vision is blurry, and his just-about-everything hurts, so it's a little difficult to say.
It's hard to believe how light out it is, still, even through the tree cover and smoke-screened stars. The moon is a bare sliver, but somehow Bucky can still make out leaves on the branches and mud caked on the soles of his unlaced boots. Maybe light isn't the right word, he considers. It's still dark, just... well defined. At least, it is when he's able to stop and notice it. He struggles to stay upright, shuffle his mud-heavy boots one after the other, until at some distant point he can collapse inside his tent and sleep. He seems to get shakier as he goes, knees threatening to give out under the weight of exhaustion and stiff, aching muscles.
An arm wraps around his ribs and pulls him flush against-- Steve. He'd forgotten, in the confusion of two days on their endless trudge back toward camp, just how big he is now; and it's a testament to Bucky's own dazed mind that this is not actually topping his 'holy shit' list this week. First prize winner would be his own incredible and unlikely survival. In second place would be his sudden and emasculating role as the distressed damsel in his own damn rescue, (by his aforementioned suddenly-frighteningly-fit best friend, no less). But the rest of it, all the questions, all the information he feels an indignant right to know as official 'best guy' in Steve's life, takes a back seat to his desire for the long march to end. He so desperately needs to sleep.
Bucky's stomach growls.
Okay, he amends, it wouldn't be bad to get something to eat, either. Except then he remembers what that means for him, now, and his knees do finally buckle.
"Hey! Hey, almost there, stay with me."
Bucky swallows hard and tries to focus on anything but the lance of sudden pain in his belly. Thankfully, he's wounded enough that there are plenty of other distractions at hand to occupy him. His bloodied side, his broken fingers, and oh- his left ankle, for example, was crunching like gravel every time he tried to put weight on it. At least he could put weight on it now- an unnaturally fast reaction, bones re-situating themselves on their own somehow. One of the perks of whatever poison they'd shot him up with in that place.
But that isn't all it did, though, is it?
Bucky's stomach growls again and he feels sweat break on the back of his neck. Jesus. How-- God, how's he going to do this? How could he possibly think he could go back, knowing what he is? What he... what he needs. The pain in his stomach is starting to gnaw with icy teeth, and Bucky's head spins dizzily. He can't tell Steve. No, he can't. His throat constricts with the sudden panic. The poison. The fucking poison, and that nagging hunger whose voice will grow... he can already feel it, he knows what will happen if he tries to ignore it. He knows-- Bucky swallows and tries to drag in a breath-- he knows what will happen if he can't eat soon, he knows what it'll make him do--
And just like that, his vision whites until he begins to make out shapes moving in the periphery of his eyes, hears the screaming, the screaming, grown men crying for their mothers, their sergeant, Jesus, whoever could hear, and God who can't hear them in this silent hell where the devils all wear white masks and speak in soft clinical voices, scribble notes on charts and map out his body like a med school cadaver, cutting, stabbing, breaking, does it hurt, does it burn, do you know where you are, do you know who you are, do you know what you have become, Bucky? Bucky?
Bucky?
"Bucky? No, no, come on, Buck. Come back. That's it. Breathe. Breathe for me, just like you used to tell me, right? Easy, now. In, out. Like that. There you go, easy, in. Out."
The hands on his shoulders are firm. No trace left of the little blonde boy from Brooklyn, so righteous, diving into trouble at the first sign of injustice; and here's his oldest pal on his knees in the mud, sobbing like a scared shitless dame all because his stomach hurts, and he knows what that means now.
He wonders, desperately, how God would let a man like Stevie climb down into a pit so deep for a guy like him.
Maybe he should never have survived. The men, screaming, echoing behind his eyes. It won't stop, he knows, or go away. It will reverberate forever like the pulse he is supposed to have, throbbing in his chest because he remembers that sometimes, near the end, he was the one they screamed to get away from. He was the monster they tried to escape.
What have I done? Oh God, what have I done? What have I done? For a second, not even long enough to stumble his steps, he sees himself in the corner of that dank and lightless cellar, a body purpled and swollen with rot tossed in the corner opposite, and the smell choking him. He remembers the vomit and the reek of fear, how the sounds of his breath were the only company in the dark after the screaming stopped and he could force his sobs back down into his chest.
What have I done? I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry
Almost two whole weeks that time. He was biting himself by the end of it: look. His arms are almost healed. Do you think Zola will want us to note that?
This is hell. This is hell. Ma, I wish I'd never left, I wish I could see you, see Becca and Stevie, and oh God, it's not bad enough I'll die here. I'm killing for them. I killed. I killed him, I knew him and I killed him, I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm-
His breath hitches and he chokes on the memory. At least Steve hadn't seen, at least he'd found him on a day they were testing the serum, and not in that filthy chamber that smelled and looked like a charnel house. Do you think he'll starve to death if he bleeds out? Can he suffocate? How long does it take to regrow every bone in the right middle finger after they've been removed? It felt like it, yes, three weeks, Ma, Ma, I don't want to die but God do I wish I was dead...
Steve carefully lowers him to the ground and brushes the hair from his forehead as though Bucky were something deserving of that kind of gentleness, and it makes him retch a few times but there's nothing to come up. It just makes his stomachache worse.
"Easy, Buck," he whispers, "We're okay. You're not there, you're out, we got you. They aren't gonna hurt you anymore. I'll kill 'em if they try, you better believe me. Okay? Easy, now."
Bucky understands that Steve doesn't know what he's done. If he did, he wouldn't even look at him, and he damn well wouldn't touch him. But Steve isn't that kind of man, no. He'd be kind to Bucky in the end, whether he deserved it or not. Probably put him out of his misery right then and there. How? Bullets didn't work, he wouldn't know to strangle me, maybe he'd try to cut my goddamn head off... Bucky wishes, for a moment, that he would have left him on that table, strapped down, to starve.
Because maybe Steve wouldn't understand, but that doesn't matter. Bucky understands. It's what he deserves.