Chapter Text
“There’s a body in the garden.”
The words were spoken calmly, while Bucky kept his eyes locked onto the gangly form prostrate in the dirt outside. When he’d spotted it in a casual pass of the window, he’d experienced shock for all of half a second before he’d quickly transitioned into acceptance and wariness.
He stepped back from the window as Steve rushed up, a damp blue dish towel in his hands. Steve’s eyes immediately narrowed in on the form that was face down by the tomato plants. It was a good sign that Bucky wasn’t hallucinating, and a bad sign in that it meant the corpse in the garden was real.
Steve gave Bucky a look, the corners of his mouth sternly downturned.
“I didn’t put it there,” Bucky said, just in case that was in question.
And yeah, maybe there were about forty other more pressing issues with the situation than the idea that someone would try to pin this on him. Like who the person was, or why exactly they died. Or the fact that whatever had done it knew where he lived. From what he was seeing what had been left was in so rough a shape that he doubted any unenhanced human had caused the damage.
Which meant they could still be around, and Bucky just wasn’t seeing them.
“I didn’t think you did,” Steve said, back to staring out the window.
The words shouldn’t have been a surprise, but Bucky still felt something that had been tense inside of him loosen. He knew that even if Steve had thought Bucky had actually killed the guy, he would have given Bucky a chance to make his case, or else try to deal with the entire thing himself.
Bucky grabbed a gun while Steve picked up his Wakandan arm shields, and they went outside to see their new visitor.
If it was an ambush, it wasn’t immediately apparent. The sun was beaming down full force on the cobblestone path leading to the raised beds Bucky had set up earlier that spring. There wasn’t anything out of the ordinary in any lines of sight besides of course the body which, annoyingly, was still insisting on being a completely real situation.
Steve went right up to it. Bucky kept his gun readily raised, and his eyes constantly scanning, his ears peeled for anything signaling an attack.
Nothing. Bucky turned most of his focus forward with a roiling unease as Steve crouched next to the body.
It was tall, dressed in torn leather, with a shredded green cape hanging by threads from its shoulders. Where the skin wasn’t grey, it was a dozen other shades between black and red, what looked like radiation burns warping it in gruesome patches, and severe bruising stretching down the palm of its left hand.
Steve carefully put his hands on it, flipping it onto its back, revealing a ghostly grey face and a blackened neck, glassy eyes and a bloodstained face. A man who looked like he could have died from any single one of the visible injuries, but Bucky found himself narrowing in on the neck marks. They looked like they’d been caused by something big.
“It’s Loki,” Steve said, staring down in shock. “Thor’s brother. He told us he died in space.”
Bucky breathed out, looking over their surroundings again. There were still no visible threats, but Bucky liked it even less now that they had an identification of their visitor. It made his arrival seem like even more of a targeted decision.
He exhaled heavily. “So why the hell is his corpse out here smashing my parsley?”
Steve put his fingers to bloated and blackened skin. A look of shock overcame his expression. “He’s not a corpse. He’s alive.”
Bucky tightened his hold on his gun. “What?”
“I’ve got a pulse,” Steve said.
Well, fuck.
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They brought him into the house. The exposure to the sun had baked his skin, made the metal on his armor close to searing. Steve seemed to think moving him wouldn’t cause much of a problem making the damage worse, which made Bucky even less happy about what was going to happen if the guy didn’t just kick it and save him the trouble. He didn’t know much about Loki, but what he did know involved him singlehandedly killing dozens of people before attempting a massive invasion of Earth. The first wave, years before Thanos had taken them all out.
But he guessed this was happening. And at least one alien was a lot easier than a whole goddamn army.
The twenty minutes the doors had been open had let all of the cool air rush out of the house. Steve carried his burden down to the basement while Bucky gave one last check of the yard and the driveway, still expecting someone else to turn up at any moment. Bodies didn’t just end up in people’s yards at random.
But it looked like they were still good for the moment.
Bucky made his way down to the basement, where Steve had propped Loki up on one of the sturdy superhuman-withstanding exercise benches - which had, like the rest of the house, been a generous donation from the CEO of Stark Industries. Everyone who had taken part in that battle that was still on Earth had ended up a lot more financially comfortable in its aftermath.
Bucky hadn’t exactly been mentally comfortable with it, considering all that had gone down between him and the CEO’s husband. But there wasn’t a whole lot Bucky was a hundred percent comfortable with these days, and he’d just learned to work around that fact.
Like he was doing now, in this exact situation.
Loki was limp, reddened eyes still half-open with that eerie blank stare. There was no movement, nothing to so much hint at any attempts at respiration. But Steve and then Bucky confirmed that whatever pulse had been felt before was still there, if faint.
And was it Bucky’s imagination, or were the marks on his neck starting to look...better?
Bucky checked him for weapons while they tried to figure out how to get off the complicated armor. They ended up resorting to cutting free the parts they couldn’t disassemble themselves, and as the leather was pulled free it revealed just how much the armor was working to fill that body out.
This wasn’t a condition someone got into in a single fight, or even over the course of a week. There were signs of extreme and consistent deprivation - the most obvious of which was the emaciation, the bones pressing to skin. The second was the muscle atrophy. There were also more contusions and some wicked-looking scars, but those were superficial by comparison to everything else.
His left wrist was definitely broken. Bucky probed at it with metal fingers and saw shifting bones under what swelling there was beneath the stretched skin. His neck was in even worse shape, fucked to hell from what was a clearly crushing force, with widespread hematomas reaching down to his sternum. Bucky wished he didn’t have a suspicion of what exactly the type of weapon that injury might have come from.
He noticed with a start that leaning down like he was meant those dead eyes were locked directly onto him. He quickly pulled his hand away, moving out of range.
Steve performed his own assessment, and looked like he was coming to the same grim conclusions. He made eye contact with Bucky, face set and serious, and Bucky already knew that it was too much to hope for that this would be a situation that had an easy out. Like a simple bullet to the skull. Or just calling someone to take the entire thing off his hands.
He sighed, forehead creasing. “I’ll get the med kits.”
He came back down with a pack of supplies, and either the lighting was playing tricks with his eyes - which he knew had been perfect even before he’d been juiced up by an experimental HYDRA cocktail - or more of the grey was definitely seeping out of Loki’s skin. It looked like he was visibly improving even in the few minutes he’d been inside.
It was fucking weird. But Bucky wasn’t going to question it right now.
They bandaged and braced him as best they could. He still hadn’t taken any visible breaths, but every time they checked the pulse came back - sluggish, and weak, but there. If he had any kind of organ failure from his condition, it wasn’t taking him out.
They dressed him. He was all but swimming in a pair of Bucky’s black sweat pants, even with the drawstring pulled to its tightest, threatening to slide further down his jutting hipbones. The matching shirt wasn’t much better, the dark color offsetting his sickly pallor with a more dramatic contrast.
Steve briefed Bucky on what he knew about Loki - from the invasion, so Bucky had a better idea of what they’d be dealing with if he’d been at full strength, all the way to his supposed final death. The fact the general story was capped with what amounted to a final “and then he apparently stopped trying to murder everyone and was fine, probably” wasn’t much of a comfort.
Even if it sounded a little familiar.
“Guess you’re staying for dinner,” Bucky said, feeling some of his sour mood ease at Steve’s responding smile.
Steve dipped his head briefly. “I didn’t pack an overnight bag.”
“Tough,” Bucky said, crouching and organizing the supplies back into their places in the med kit. “I already had to surrender some of my clothes to the emaciated alien.”
Steve raised his eyebrows, sliding the last bandage roll within reach with his foot so Bucky could store it. “That sentence would make a lot more sense if you didn’t own about forty pairs of sweat pants.”
Bucky exhaled, wondering at the possessive urge sweeping through him. Yeah, maybe he could have used a shrink or five to help with unraveling some of the crap that was still in his head. But he thought he was doing good. For the most part. It was just that every once in a while there’d be a surprise of a wall that he would come up against when he was dealing with other people.
He didn’t really consider himself materialistic. But apparently the idea of sacrificing his clothes - just the dumb shit that he’d gone and picked out, trying to figure out which exact pair was the comfiest - was a lot more of a problem than his brain could just dump and move on.
It was Steve, though. That made it a lot easier.
Loki, on the other hand...
“Fine,” he said, getting to his feet with the med kit under his arm. “But you’re washing up again. And you’re taking the first watch.”
“Sounds fair,” Steve said, with a disarming smile, like he wasn’t confused about Bucky’s response. “How ‘bout a couple of shirts?”
“Don’t push it, Rogers.”
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By the end of the night, everyone in the house was wearing a pair of Bucky’s sweat pants except for Bucky.
He gave Steve another solid pair, carefully avoiding his favorites - like the ones with the embroidered floral print down the sides, or the official Falcon ones he’d found at a yard sale. The second hadn’t actually been on display, he’d just seen one of the seller’s kids wearing them and offered them all the cash he’d had in his wallet. It had been worth it to see the look on Wilson’s face - annoyed at first, and then eventually he’d started constantly asking why Bucky wasn’t wearing them whenever he’d come to visit, no matter what Bucky was currently in the middle of doing.
Bucky didn’t bother getting changed himself. He already knew he wasn’t relaxed enough to get much sleep, even if he was making Steve be the one to stay up to keep an eye on their uninvited guest. And even if that uninvited guest looked like he’d been run over a few times by a tank and then sucked into a quinjet’s engines.
He went outside for some fresh air and checked the perimeter of his property two more times, across the grass and around the clusters of trees including the maple he’d been planning on tapping for the first time that year when winter rolled around. There were no signs that anyone had carried the body in.
He went back to the spot in the garden where they’d found Loki. There wasn’t anything disturbed but the patch of herbs he’d crushed; their fragrance hung heavy on the air.
As far as Bucky could tell, Loki hadn’t been dumped by anyone. He didn’t have any injuries consistent with damage from a fall. It was like he’d just appeared out of thin air, there on the ground.
Bucky did what he always did when there was a lull in his life and the things around him weren’t making much sense: he wrote in his journal. The tactile nature of it, getting the thoughts in his head down onto paper, helped him wind down after a stressful day. As a bonus, when he woke up he could reread it, just to prove to himself whatever new clusterfuck he went through had actually happened.
Of course, with this particular situation, proving it wasn’t going to be an issue. Unless Loki did him a favor and disappeared into thin air as quickly as he’d come in the first place.
Wishful thinking, he thought. But he did a lot of wishful thinking, these days. Sometimes he even managed to not feel guilty about it.
This time, he didn’t get the chance for much more of it.
Steve hadn’t even gone downstairs for the evening when it happened like a train wreck: the first sign of life. Bucky’s instincts felt it ahead of his higher brain functions, a wary terror that sent him shooting to his feet before his ears processed the inhuman howling coming up from beneath the floor. A gasp-wail, haunting and shrill, that sent both him and Steve rushing full speed towards the basement. Bucky didn’t bother to take the steps, just jumped over them to land at the ready at the bottom, with Steve joining him half a second later.
Loki wasn’t on the bench, or anywhere else in the rec room; Bucky could hear him, though - scraping at the floor like a desperate rat through the open bathroom door. The light in there was brighter than the dim bulb that covered the rest of the basement, and the layout of it meant there wouldn’t be many places to hide. Bucky let Steve take point as they approached.
“Loki?”
No answer, but the scrabbling abruptly cut off. Bucky could still hear the breathing, shallow and shredded wheezes coming from around the corner that sent his hackles stiff. Maybe to some people, a sound like that would be unusual, probably even worrying.
Most of what it told Bucky was that whatever was behind that door was weak, and severely injured, and just begging to be finished off.
Steve entered carefully, face front to the source of the noise, and some of the defensive set left his shoulders as his eyes grew more distressed. Bucky was only a step behind, so he got his own look soon enough.
The sight was unreal - it looked like Loki had been attempting to wedge his broken body between the sink and the toilet before it had given out. He was writhing on his back, chest heaving in shallow hitches like he was experiencing the throes of compressive asphyxia while simultaneously being strangled. His bloodshot eyes were wide and terrified, shooting to Steve as his teeth bared against his own choking breaths. His coloring had gone from grey to a chalky white, which only emphasized the grotesque tones of the blood pooled beneath his skin.
Steve, of course, moved closer. Bucky tensed hard as a rock but Loki didn’t lash out, just stayed supine as he let out another of those inhuman wheeze-screams. He looked like he was trying to move his limbs but couldn’t, and every time he failed he only grew more frantic, struggled that much more to take in air, and only made it harder for himself to breathe.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” Steve said.
Speak for yourself, Bucky would have thought, if he wasn’t himself feeling taken aback at the fact that this heap of bones and bruises and burns was still anything like functional.
Loki didn’t say anything in response. His eyes were going glazed. Bucky thought of a baby rat he’d found one day in the garden, the dropped meal of a spooked hawk. How it had puffed air out in little labored hitches, before going still.
Loki did the same thing - his panicked breaths eventually ending in him going completely limp. Except he wasn’t dead.
Bucky’s heart was pounding in the aftermath. “You sure we shouldn’t just put him out of his misery?”
Steve looked at a loss. He carefully crouched down and put his hand to Loki’s neck. “His pulse feels stronger.”
“A lot of things that should be dead can still have a heartbeat,” Bucky said, voice coming out a little harsher than he’d intended.
Steve gave him a sharp look, and Bucky sighed through his nose as he recognized that stubbornness starting to build up. He’d given his two cents; Steve had denied them. Bucky would act like he was over it, and keep his misgivings to himself.
“Let’s get him back,” Steve said, reaching over to fix Loki’s clothes - the sweat pants were so loose on him he’d nearly lost them in his escape, hanging low over jutting hip bones.
Bucky took a step closer. “You’re not gonna call anyone?”
Steve shook his head. “I have a feeling none of our doctors are going to be able to help with this. Thor tends to just walk off his injuries - usually whatever science we have can’t keep up with what his body can do on its own.”
Bucky looked at the body on the floor in surprise. “You’re telling me you’re expecting him to just come back from this?”
Steve put his arms under Loki, carefully lifting him from the ground. He shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out.”