19

(Steve POV) 

I'm woken up in the middle of the night by my door swinging open and the floorboards creaking beneath it. 

"It's really late, Buck," I mumble sleepily. "You okay?" 

I don't get an answer at first, and all I hear is quiet dripping. There was probably a storm, which may have caused some leakage, and he's scared. Bucky hates thunderstorms. 

Drip. 

"Steve...?" 

Drip. 

Something is definitely wrong. Suddenly high alert, I reach over and turn on the lamp beside my bed.

The first thing I notice is the blood.

It's everywhere. On him, on the floor, on the door and on the walls. It drips from his body onto the floor in a nerve-wracking rhythm, and my first thought is that he's killed someone. 

Drip. Drip. Drip.

I force my gaze away from his bloodstained jacket and look at his face. There's snow in his hair and his lips are tinted blue. There's fear in his eyes and he just looks absolutely helpless. He's breathing raggedly, clearly struggling just to keep himself up. 

Drip. Drip. 

"Help me," he begs, voice barely above a whisper. 

I find myself unable to move. My mouth is dry and I grow increasingly frustrated as I try as hard as I can to will myself to just get up because my best friend is hurt and I'm just staring at him. 

Something is wrong.

In a weak effort to find the source of the blood, I look back down at his jacket- his Howling Commandos jacket, for some reason. The one he was wearing when he- 

"It's not real." I finally find my voice, hoarse as it is. 

Drip. 

"Stevie," he tries again, sounding twice as broken as he did the last time. "Help me. Please." 

Trying to rid myself of this awful vision, I look down at my hands. My tiny hands, attached to skinny little arms that I haven't seen on myself in nearly a century. As I stare in horror, my cupped hands begin to well up with blood, eventually spilling over into my blanketed lap. I feel no pain. It's not my blood. 

Noticing that the maddening dripping noise has ceased, I look up at Bucky to find something worse than before. Taking the place of 1940s Bucky, the Winter Soldier now stood in the shaded corner of my room, pointing a gun at me.

"You didn't help me," he accuses, voice carefully apathetic. 

BANG 

I sit up in bed with a choked gasp, hand held to my chest to steady my heartbeat. I look around the room wildly, trying to locate the danger, but find none. All I find is Bucky, not bleeding and not brainwashed, sitting on the left side of my bed and holding my hand. 

"You were crying," he tells me. "Are you okay?" 

Instead of responding, I pull him into a hug tight enough to asphyxiate a normal person. Luckily, neither of us are normal, and he doesn't say anything. 

"I'm sorry," I whisper into his shoulder. "I am so, so sorry." 

"For what?"

"For not saving you on the train! It's my fault that all of this has happened to you! My fault that you're-" 

I nearly end the sentence with 'that you're like this.' This isn't a problem. This isn't a bad thing. It is okay for him to be like this. He has accepted this.

Bucky audibly takes a deep breath and slightly pushes me away, positioning us so he can look me in the eye.

"Don't apologize for that," he says firmly. "It wasn't your fault, and honestly? If we could go back and change what happened, I wouldn't want to." 

I furrow my eyebrows in confusion, wondering why he would choose this life over the one he had.

"Look," he starts to defend himself before I even start saying anything. "We can stay together this way. Even if I hadn't fallen off that train, I coulda died some other time during the war, and even if I survived that, you probably still would have outlived me by a longshot with the serum. If taking away what.. what H.Y.D.R.A did to me would have taken away our chances of staying together, I wouldn't do it. So don't be sorry. I'm not."

I say nothing, silently processing what he's said. When a few minutes to by and I'm still quiet, Bucky starts to awkwardly slide off the bed to make his departure. In an embarrassing moment of panic, I reach out and grab his wrist to stop him. 

He looks up at me expectantly, kind of on the floor but mostly leaning against the bed.

"Can you stay?" I plead, not wanting to hear 'no,' but expecting it anyway. 

"Yeah." He uses my hand to drag himself up next to me. "Yeah, I'll stay." 

I turn out the lamp and we both lay there in a regrettably tense silence. I keep turning toward him to ask the question that's been nagging at the back of my mind for a little bit, and then turning away. Eventually I decide to just ask anyway.

"Bucky?" I ask into the darkness.

"Yeah?" The darkness asks back. 

"Did you crawl here?"

I had noticed the complete lack of wheelchair and I had to know.

"...No. I gracefully hopped here."

A moment passes and we both start snickering like little children up past their bedtime. Gradually, that quiet envelopes us once more, but the tension has passed. 

"Bucky?" I say once more, getting a soft chuckle in response.

"Yeah?"

"I love you." 

I regret saying it instantly. It puts him on the spot and I didn't even consider that we aren't comfortable enough with each other to say such things again.

"I love you, too, pal. You're my best friend." 

(Ooh man I sure am tired)