Chapter Text
It had been a hard mission.
It shouldn’t have been difficult but it had been. They’d only been a team for a few months now and they just could not get a good rhythm down with one another. They were too independent. They’d all been out in the cold, alone, for too long, and Valentina was threatening team building exercises.
Nobody wanted that.
But the threat of trust falls didn’t really bother Yelena. What bothered her was the threat of losing her team. That scared her. Going back out into the cold. Alone.
So, as they dragged themselves into the penthouse of the Watchtower, dusty, smelling of something putrid, exhausted from the mission, she couldn’t help but watch everyone.
“You guys did a great job!” Bob beamed at them as he came scurrying out of the penthouse kitchen.
“Thanks Bob,” Yelena sighed.
“We did a terrible job,” Ava groused. She went to the lounge in the middle of the space they’d agreed to call ‘HQ’ and plopped down with a grunt as she reached to peel off her boots.
“C’mon you guys, it wasn’t that bad,” Yelena insisted.
But even her father, she noticed, was grumpy. He went to the bar first. Alexei had recently shaved his beard off after the initial wave of Santa Clause memes had reached his Instagram feed. He didn’t mind so much as Valentina. She threatened to cut him off from sponsors if he kept it. The shave made him look younger and that weirded her out.
“We suck as Avengers,” the Red Guardian insisted with a dour and contemplative smoothing of his mustache.
“But you got the bad guy!” Bob pressed.
Bob. Always good for a pick-me-up.
“We pancaked the bad guy,” Walker corrected. He went to the computers and started pulling up the drone footage of their performance like it was footage of a football game that he needed to study. “And we were supposed to take him in alive.”
Bob hesitated, idly wiping at the bright flower-patterned apron he was wearing. “…I probably shouldn’t have made pancakes for dinner…”
“You made pancakes for us?” Yelena gave him a big smile. “Aww that’s so sweet, Bob, thank you.”
He shot her a shaky grin. “You’re welcome.”
The atmosphere of the room was flat and heavy, like a wet wool blanket. Everyone was distant and deflated and overwhelmed by all of the grandeur of the job, the place. Nobody really fit into the Watchtower. They were all a bunch of loser gutter rats set loose in a palace.
“Guys, I think we should talk about this,” Yelena started.
“About how we’re not the Avengers?” Walker sneered. “Great. That’s just the encouragement I needed, thanks.”
“No, but the Avengers weren’t that great,” she argued. “They had a better balance of super powers, sure, but they weren’t all buddy-buddy good friends. They were just really opinionated colleagues who got smooshed together on the same team because of some guy with an eye patch.”
“Fury,” Alexei supplied for her, before he tipped back a shot of vodka.
“Oh and we’re special because we all walked through each other’s shame rooms?” U.S. Agent asked sarcastically. He too had undergone a change, swapping the stupid helmet for an even stupider hat. “When exactly is that trauma bonding supposed to kick in? Are we buddies yet?”
“Look, all I’m saying is that maybe we should take the lesson we learned with Bob and apply it to everyone on the team,” Yelena tried to clarify. “And I would love to be your buddy, Walker.”
“Yes!” Alexei pumped his fists into the air. “We shall unite as one under the glorious haze of battle wounds and be invincible!”
Yelena rubbed at her temples. While she appreciated that Alexei would always support her, she wished sometimes that her father would at least be a little less eager about it.
“Do you really expect us to just…what, open up to each other?” John pressed, his expression dubious.
“I wouldn’t mind talking about what happened today,” Ava said as she set her boots down and let her bare feet bury into the thick shaggy carpet that was probably more expensive than anything Yelena had ever bought. “Not so sure about sharing feelings but we could certainly talk bad tactics. I recall a certain shield that nearly cut me in half today…”
“I said I was sorry!” Walker threw his hands up.
“No, that’s not what I mean! I mean we need to bond and talk about things that happen!” Yelena threw up her hands too.
“That was definitely a thing that happened!” Ava snapped. She gestured obviously to the cut in her suit, where her hip was now visible.
“…Not to interrupt but, uh, where’s Bucky?” Bob cut in, innocently.
Yelena looked around with a frown. “He…He came in with us. I saw him come in with us.”
“He did. He must have slipped out.” Ava was looking around too. “Look, I’m also going to slip out. I’m having a shower and a change of clothes.”
“Same,” Walker agreed. “Bob, you got any bacon to go with those pancakes?”
Bob brightened. “I can make some. Uh…” He glanced at Yelena. They’d talked about their bonding issues a lot and he understood. “Family dinner in…say forty-five minutes? In the dining room?”
“We have a dining room?” Yelena frowned. The vastness of this place was absurd.
“Ah…Family dinner here in HQ. Forty-five minutes,” Bob amended.
And, like magic, they all dispersed, each to their own spaces. And there were a lot of spaces to be had. The Watchtower really was too much. There weren’t even any other workers in the tower. It was literally just them – and hundreds of empty rooms.
The team had been assigned quarters on the penthouse floor. Valentina insisted on keeping most of their activity – or rather the use of utilities – on one floor but they were permitted to use the parking garage, the helipad, the clinic on the floor below them, and the gym on 52. The other floors were locked out of the elevator (as if that could stop any of them, which was a laughable assumption, really).
The quarters (hidden away from the media tour) were markedly less lavish than HQ but still comfortably equipped. Each of them had a small studio apartment space with a kitchenette, bathroom, and bedroom. Hers was across the hall from Bobs. It was a little sterile and corporate for her taste but it beat bouncing around from flea-infested slum to flea-infested slum and not having to pay rent was nice.
Yelena showered quickly and changed into joggers, an oversized hoodie, and a pair of slippers. By the time she came out, she could smell bacon.
And she could see blood.
It wasn’t a lot of blood, just a smear of it, but it brushed across the doorframe to Bucky’s apartment.
She frowned, trying to remember the injuries they’d accrued on this mission and coming up blank. Yelena rapped her knuckles on his door.
“Barnes? Hey, are you in there? Are you okay?”
No sounds from inside.
But there was more blood, in droplets, on the floor, leading away from the apartments and the rest of the penthouse.
Walker emerged from his room, his damp hair askew, in gym shorts and a college football tee-shirt. “What are you looking at?” he wondered from a few doors down.
“There’s blood on the floor,” Yelena told him.
Concern etched across Walker’s face and John came over to peer at what she was seeing. “Bucky?”
“I think so…” She started down the hall to follow it. “Did he get hurt while we were out? Like, for real hurt. I mean, you guys get hit a lot and get thrown into things a lot but that’s just like always.”
Walker trailed behind her. “…I don’t remember. I lost him when he went into the research tent. And then it exploded but he was already running out of it by then.”
“What are we looking at?” Ava had materialized from her room, in a long cardigan and leggings, and joined in the parade down the hall.
“Blood on the floor,” Yelena told her.
The three of them moved cautiously, as they were all trained to do, with Yelena leading the way. The blood drops were a steady distance apart and went all the way down the hall, past all of their rooms, past the two guest bedrooms that nobody was living in, past the guest bathroom, and into the stairwell.
The blood droplets were starkly visible here, on the industrial gray-blue latex paint. They went down and wound around and went through to the next floor. Down another hallway.
“He’s probably in the clinic,” Walker remarked.
And then they walked past the clinic. It was remarkably empty. The blood drops did go towards the clinic, inside, but then came right back out again.
“Nope, the trail keeps going,” Yelena remarked. Down the hall again, around the corner, and to a closed door. That was the end of the trail, presumably.
“What do you think is in there?” Ava asked in a soft whisper. “Another exam room?”
“Isn’t that the laundry room?” John asked with a frown.
“I think it’s an office or something…”
“Laundry room is on the other side of the penthouse, how do you not know where it is?” Ava asked with a deeper frown.
Yelena yanked the door open, quickly, like she was expecting to find something dangerous on the other side.
And technically, she did find something dangerous.
Bucky was there.
He was there, at a large mahogany desk that was littered with medical supplies, with a suturing needle clenched between his teeth and a nasty circular gash in his arm that pulled to the side in the motion of the needle and thread. Shock painted over his face.
“What the hell are you doing?!” Yelena snapped.
The shock gave way to a perturbed frown. He spat the needle out and it dangled from his bicep. “What does it look like I’m doing?” he grumped back.
“We have a clinic, you know! What is this? Is this an office?”
Bucky let out a sigh through his nose and picked up a square of gauze that he pressed to his arm.
The room had all the trappings of an office, and a nice one at that. Maybe an office for some kind of big important research doctor, once upon a time. The windows let in the golden glow of the late evening sun.
“Geeze, Barnes,” Walker gawked from the doorway.
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine,” Ava insisted.
“I’m fine.”
“You know what? This is the kind of thing I was talking about.” Yelena started back down the hallway. “Stay there. All of you. I’ll be right back, we’re having a team meeting. Make sure he stays there, Walker!”
There was a chorus of grumbling behind her as she left them behind and stormed back up to the penthouse, retracing her steps. As she went past the living quarters, Alexei poked his head out of his apartment and gave her a quizzical look.
“Team meeting in the office,” she told him.
“In the where?”
“The office-the…Go to the clinic and go around the corner, down the hallway. You’ll see the others.” She motioned sharply back the way she’d come.
Anger percolated in her belly but it mingled with a confusing blend of sorrow and exasperation.
Why couldn’t they all just be normal?
“Bob? Bob!” Yelena called as she came up on the penthouse kitchen. It didn’t have a door which was a shame because she was in a door kicking mood. “We’re having a team meeting in the office.”
Bob was mid-motion, a tong-full of bacon being placed on a plate that was already piled high with bacon. He must have cooked three pounds of it for them. And that was touching, because nobody really had ever cooked for her in a nice way since she was a girl pretending to be in a normal American family.
“Is everything ok? No…Sorry, that’s a dumb question, you’re not ok,” he observed. “What’s wrong?”
Yelena paced in a tight circle, her fists in tight balls. “I found Bucky in the office trying to stitch up a hole in his arm and I just…I just want us to stop doing this! So we’re going to talk about it!”
Bob absorbed that a moment and then nodded. “Uh. Ok, but maybe let’s not go in there angry.”
“I’m not angry!”
“Well…”
“Okay, I’m a little angry but I still need us to talk about it. To talk to each other. About real things,” Yelena pressed her fingers into her palm as she laid out her needs. “And I need us to help each other and not just do these stupid things by ourselves!”
Bob fixed her with a contemplative look. He wasn’t exactly a bold man. He tried too hard to be agreeable to everyone, all the time, but he wanted to help. She felt bad sometimes because she was terrible at letting people help.
“What? What’s your ideas?” she finally asked him, deflating a little.
He smiled at her. “Hand me the tray over there.”
--
Bob balanced two loaded trays, one on each steady palm, as Yelena navigated them back down towards the office. He knew exactly what room she was talking about and liked to think of it as the Library but that didn’t matter much.
The argument was obvious before they even got into the room.
“—I swear to god, Walker—”
“—Just hold still—”
“—taught you how to stitch!?”
“Oh my god, shut up, all of you!” Yelena snapped.
They all fell silent at her admonishment but Bob knew the silence probably wouldn’t last long. He cleared his throat. “Uhm…dinner?”
The tone shifted immediately.
He carefully slid the trays on the desk, pushing aside medical supplies. Yelena had the coffee carafe and a handful of mugs. He had everything else.
The Library was a comfortable size but it felt a little small with them all in it. It boasted two leather armchairs, a sofa, the desk, and walls of book shelves. He’d taken upon himself to find books for the shelves the last few months so they were half-filled by now.
And as Ava and Walker and Yelena helped themselves to pancakes and bacon, Bob watched as the Red Guardian quietly sided up to the Winter Soldier.
“Товарищ, позвольте мне позаботиться об этой травме. Я потороплюсь,” Alexei murmured softly, a genuine look of care and concern in his eyes.
And something gave in Bucky Barnes because the man nodded. “Спасибо.”
While the others settled around the Library with paper plates and coffee, Alexei carefully started to stitch the wound closed in a way that reminded Bob that Alexei took pride in his identity as a family man. His big hands were gentle and calm and sure. Something like brotherhood seemed to be growing between the super soldiers, Walker included – although Walker was clearly the baby brother of the three.
“That’s a nasty hole in your arm,” Yelena observed. She sat on the couch and patted the space next to her for Ava to sit. “I don’t remember that happening.”
“Uh, the research tent,” Bucky admitted tersely.
“Knew it,” Walker boasted. He smirked as he sat down on the floor near Ava, a mug in one hand and a flopping pancake in the other. He unceremoniously dipped the pancake in his mug.
Yelena gasped. “Did you just dip your pancake into your coffee?”
Walker glanced up at her, his cheeks full. He nodded, and a sudden uncertainty crossed his face.
“That sounds delicious!” she quickly assured him.
Ava reached over his shoulder and dipped a piece of her own pancake into his coffee mug, humming appreciatively.
“Hey, thanks Bobby,” Walker mumbled out around his mouthful.
“Yes, thank you Bob,” Ghost agreed.
The praise was unexpected and Bob smiled at them, nodding, feeling warm.
Bucky heaved a sigh. “Look, much as I appreciate the moral support and the dinner, I’d really rather just brood in silence. Why did you all follow me in here?”
“Group therapy,” Yelena supplied. “Team support. Team um…debriefing.”
“Group therapy…” Bucky rolled his eyes.
“C’mon, Buck. Elders first,” John joked.
“Mm, no, you don’t get to call me Buck—"
“Look, I know it feels a little co-dependent but we need to debrief and check in with each other. Here’s what I want to know,” Yelena started. Then she paused. Bob could read the hesitation in her expression, like she was ready to ask some deep soul-searching question but thinking better of it. “Uh, doesn’t that hurt like a lot? Your arm? You’re not even wincing or anything.”
Bucky’s scowl lifted upwards as he pointed his long-suffering ire at the ceiling. But he was quiet for a long moment and they all let the silence stand, even as Alexei very carefully tied off a stitch.
“If I leave the room, are you all going to follow me?” Bucky finally asked.
“Probably,” Yelena answered with a smirk.
The Winter Soldier fixed her with a look. “Fine. Did you know that it’s very difficult to drug a Super Soldier?”
“Да,” Alexei said with a nod, giving the thread a tug before snipping it.
Walker bobbed his head slowly in affirmation, suddenly more interested in the floor.
“I think I probably knew that but I’ve never really thought about it,” Yelena admitted. “Does that also give you some kind of super pain tolerance too?”
“No, but it does mean that it’s harder to get drunk, or high,” Bucky explained. “It’s harder to be poisoned. It has to do with our metabolism. And consequently, it…it makes it harder to be put under for procedures. Anesthesia doesn’t work like it should. Or at least, the options of anesthesia in my day were pretty terrible.”
“There’s a higher risk of being awake during surgery,” Walker piped in. “While you’re paralyzed. For me and my brand of serum, anyway. It happened once. After you broke my arm, actually.” He looked over at Bucky.
“Sorry 'bout that…”
“Oh sheesh,” Bob murmured, his eyebrows quirked into a frown. He only had trace memories of what O.X.E did to him and when that surfaced, it was usually in the form of a night terror that sent him spiraling for a few days. But even then, he still didn’t have clear memories.
Yelena looked from Bucky to Walker to her father and for once, the Red Guardian was not so boisterous. He looked distant, trapped in memories.
“Dad, is that true for you too?”
Alexei gave her a non-committal shrug. “Is not important when you’re a hero—”
“No, that’s important,” she insisted. “That’s really pretty important, you guys. You get like tortured every time you go in for a medical something? That’s really traumatizing!” She sat back in the couch, outraged on their behalf. “This is good to talk about. Let’s talk about it.”
“There’s not much to talk about,” Bucky said wearily. “And that’s not—My point is…” He pressed his lips together, as if he lost his point altogether.
“It changes you,” Ava said softly. “That kind of pain. After a while, you just sort of…accept the pain. Or you go mad from it. But accepting it becomes something like a self-defense mechanism. The pain tolerance.” Her eyes were a little glassy. “It’s easy to forget what not being in pain feels like when you’re in those moments. And it’s easy to slip into madness when you’re not looking.”
Silence again, as they digested that.
“Are you always in pain, Ava?” John craned his head back to look at her. “Are you in pain now?”
She quickly shook her head. “No. No, I have mostly good days now. Someone used quantum energy to stabilize my condition. But my early years were…”
“Hell,” Bucky supplied.
“Yeah.”
Yelena reached over to give the Ghost an understanding pat on the knee. There was a kinship between them and Bob felt a twinge of jealousy, which was immediately chased by a twinge of guilt for feeling jealous. They’d accepted him into this weird little family and he wasn’t about to ruin it by being ungrateful and petty.
“I can’t feel my arm,” Barnes blurted.
“What?!” came the collective outrage.
“That-that’s where I was going with my story,” Bucky fumbled. “I can’t feel anything. It’s not pain tolerance. I’m not trying to be anything…”
“Oh my god, Bucky!” Yelena was gaping at him. She patted the couch on either side of her. “Where’s my phone? We need to call—”
“No, please don’t call anyone,” the Winter Soldier pleaded.
“Bob, do you have your phone? Dad?”
“I’ll go and get mine! I left it by the toilet—”
“STOP! I’m not going to the doctor!”
They all stared at him again and he couldn’t meet the stares.
“W-why not?” Bob finally asked.
“Because,” Walker supplied, “anesthesia doesn’t work well on super soldiers.”
There was a beat as they absorbed this. Bucky gave Walker a tight-lipped look.
An inkling of knowledge tickled through him and Bob frowned as a wisp of a memory crossed his mind.
“And,” Bob added distantly, “the first time someone worked on your arm… Well, that didn’t exactly end very well.” He saw the memory, suddenly. A young, bloodied James Buchanan Barnes, restrained, screaming.
Bucky glared over at him, startled at the statement. Bob held up his hands.
“Sorry, I get… I get glimpses sometimes of what happened…y’know, in my mind. From before. Makes it easier to make connections,” Bob mumbled, his cheeks growing hot.
“Is that true, Bucky?” Yelena pressed. “Because that’s definitely stuff that you should get out of your deep trauma hole, man.”
The Winter Soldier was silent again for a long moment and, again, they let it stand. Then he let out a sudden noise of disgust that was suspiciously watery. Bob glanced over at him and felt his cheeks get even hotter and tighter. The guilt wiggled up again. He’d exposed Bucky. He left him open to scrutiny. That was rude. Bucky probably hated him…
“Bucky, it’s ok—”
“It’s an old wound. I’ve already done my court mandated therapy,” he snapped back at them. “I’m fine. My arm is fine. Everything’s fine.”
“They made you do therapy?” Alexei scoffed. “In Russia, I just get tossed in prison for a few decades. They don’t make me do therapy.” The Red Guardian finished taping down fresh gauze and finally turned to the pancakes and bacon.
“See? That’s the problem! Dad!” Yelena glared over at him. “You’d rather go to jail for twenty years instead of talking to someone?! This is why the Avengers never worked out. They all just went about their business and they never really talked to each other! We can be different, you guys! Or, I dunno, we could just wait until Walker is the next Void—”
“Hey!”
Bob’s ears felt full and stuffy all of a sudden.
“We all know it’s true, Walker,” Ava insisted, but her voice sounded far away. “And wouldn’t you rather talk to us about your family? We’ve already seen your worst rooms.”
He scowled from Yelena to Ava and then down at his coffee. “It’s called privacy.”
“It’s called being big stupid stubborn people,” Yelena grumbled. “Just…it feels so good, you guys. It feels so much better when you just talk about your problems and let it all out of you. We all got really bad sob stories, okay? It’s not a competition on who can keep it bottled up the longest.”
The next stretch of silence was a grumpy one. The tension was thick, and it wasn’t just his own. It filled the room.
Don’t run away-don’t run away-don’t run away…
Finally, Bucky let out a heavy breath.
All the eyes went back to him. He took a moment to meet each gaze, pointedly. Like he was gauging how safe it was in the room. When he looked at Bob, Bob almost flinched, expecting anger…but there was no anger, just a moment of stern concern. And was that…trust?
“If I see any of my story on the internet—”
“You won’t,” Yelena assured him. “Vault of secrets. Everyone agree?”
“What we share in group therapy stays in group therapy,” John affirmed.
“Agreed,” Ava chimed in.
“Of course, yeah,” Bob said with a nod, letting out a shaky breath.
“Yes! I like this! Thunderbolts Group Therapy,” Alexei started.
“No, that’s—enough with the Thunderbolts, Alexei, please. I can’t do that game anymore. We’re not the Thunderbolts,” Yelena grumbled.
Her father just laughed.
Bucky shook his head. He heaved one final sigh and pushed back his hair with his metal hand, leaning back in the desk chair.
“Okay. My arm,” he started, pulling the conversation back into focus. “I, uh, I already…They gave me the serum before they started working on my arm,” Bucky said in a clipped tone. “The serum happened before I fell off the train. That’s what kept me alive.” He looked down at his metal hand, flexing the fingers. “I actually had some stump left when they put the first arm on. And they tried to put me under. They did. It’s all a groggy haze from the drugs…but I remember. They had to keep me strapped down.”
He paused and frowned as the images probably came flicking back to life in his minds eye. They were certainly coming back to Bob, and he wished they weren’t.
“The first arm was clunky. It got ripped off by Isaiah Bradley in the late fifties. They put a new one on and they kept fussing with it. And it hurt. All the time. But I was only awake for missions and they didn’t really stop to ask me how I felt so it didn’t matter. Nobody cared. All they cared about was me killing the next target and being compliant. That was it. I couldn’t…I couldn’t even tell them if I’d wanted to…I didn’t…”
He trailed off, shaking his head.
“It matters,” Yelena said quietly. “It matters that it hurt. That they did that to you. I’m so sorry, Bucky.”
“That’s a raw deal, man,” John added.
“This…this is really good therapy,” Alexei whispered in a watery voice.
Bucky nodded to the affirmations but he seemed to be struggling. His jaw clenched and his lips twitched. Something else was weighing on him. Something heavy that wanted out.
“What else happened?” Yelena asked. “What do you want to talk about?”
Barnes squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, but his expression was tight, strained.
“It’s fine, Bucky, you can talk about it,” John insisted. “We’re not judging.”
“N-no,” Bucky ground out. He reached his metal hand over to his freshly bandaged arm and gave it a squeeze, letting out a stuttery breath.
“Something’s wrong,” Bob offered lamely. That wasn’t helpful. Of course something was wrong.
“It-it hurts,” Bucky hissed through clenched teeth.
“I thought you said you couldn’t feel anything,” Walker challenged, which was also unhelpful.
Bucky shot him a glare that was a little feral around the edges. Fist clenched, he extended his flesh arm out as if he was flexing out a Charlie-horse. It was trembling.
“What did you get hit with?” Yelena asked, horrified.
He shook his head, unsure, and that’s when they all saw it. A long sinuous lump lifted up under Bucky’s skin along his forearm and moved.
The horror was instantaneous.
“OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT?!” Walker yelped.
At the same time came Yelena’s “Get him to the clinic! Get him to the clinic!”
Overlaid with a throaty “Что за чертовщина это чудовище!” from Alexei.
Bucky Barnes, however, was not paying attention to any of it. He was screeching. The sound broke over them like a clap of thunder. He clamped his metal hand just under his elbow squeezed like he could wall off the intruder from climbing further up his arm.
Ava took a wide step back from the scene and did her best to shut out the noise. Panic would do her no good.
What would do good, then?
The thing in his arm had to come out.
“Bob, with me,” Ava ordered sharply. Bob was the only other one who wasn’t panicking outwardly. “Yelena, we’ll meet you in the clinic!”
She caught the Widow’s eye and Yelena nodded sharply. “Go.”
Ava Starr was good at going. She was arguably the best of them at sprinting in and out of situations. Only this time, she didn’t have her suit. There would be no quick phasing through doors or using the quantum energy to sprint faster – not if she wanted to maintain control of her corporeal body.
Bob was running with her, keeping pace, as they careened down the hall and around the corner and into the neat, clean clinic.
“What are we looking for?” he asked.
It was a fair question and Ava held still a moment, drawing in a slow breath as she thought back. She’d spent a lot of time trapped in her quantum chamber, reading books. There had been several periods of her life where she’d been acutely interested in medical science, as if she could cure her own condition with enough biology. But she did have some knowledge that could be helpful.
“Scalpel. Forceps. Antiseptic. A container to put that thing in once we get it out,” she listed. And Bob started rifling through drawers.
She could hear the commotion as they brought Bucky along. Moments later, John and Alexei were hauling Bucky into the room while Bucky tried his best to keep his legs under him. They heaved him onto the exam table where he writhed.
“Get it OUT,” he bellowed.
Yelena grabbed the scalpel that Bob had just put on a tray and advanced towards the Winter Soldier. “Hold him down!”
The two other super soldiers did their best to pin his shoulders to the exam table and keep his arm outstretched but between Bucky’s writhing and the slithering shape, it was an impossible task.
“Wait wait wait, you’re going to slice open an artery!” Ava barked.
“DO IT!” Bucky wailed.
“Just wait, I’ve got an idea!” Ava spun to the cabinet of medications; all kinds of vials lined up on wire shelves. She scanned the labels. “Bob, get me a syringe.”
“It won’t work on him!” Yelena yelled.
Ava ignored her and yanked a vial of lidocaine out of the cabinet.
There was a tremendous CRASH as something toppled.
Bob thrust the packaged syringe at her and darted to where the Winter Soldier was flailing. He shoved in next to Walker and grabbed Bucky’s metal hand.
“Squeeze my hand as hard as you can, man,” he instructed the super soldier. “Just focus here. Squeeze!”
He did. The metal squealed as he bore down on Sentry’s hand, and Bob held steady, putting his other palm on Bucky’s chest.
“Alexei, John, hold his arm out!”
The two super soldiers did as she asked and Ava held a loaded syringe poised over his skin, waiting…
There was the lump.
She jabbed the needle down into it and slammed the plunger home.
The thing went mad under his skin. It roiled and twisted and stretched.
An inhuman noise rippled out of Bucky as he pushed mindlessly against the three super humans holding him down, back arching off the table. The noise petered out as his lungs squeezed out all of his air and there was a horrible moment as they watched his eyes bulge, tears leaking free.
And then he sucked in a breath and sagged. The lump in his arm went still.
“Get it-get it-get it-get it,” he rasped, gasping.
Yelena was ready and she did not hesitate. She gritted her teeth and sliced into his arm. Blood spurted everywhere.
“Sorry, sorry,” she mumbled. But the apology died even as she said it once they all spied a shiny blue something under the blood. “Боже мой...»
A moan of horror hummed out of Bucky.
“What is that!?” Walker squeaked.
Yelena kept slicing, following the length of the lump for couple of inches. “Where’s the-the…the wound opener thing…”
“Retractor,” Ava supplied, finding the tool in a drawer and coming to unceremoniously jab it into the wound and force it open.
Bucky cursed, his eyes fluttering closed. He hadn’t let go of Bob’s hand.
“Take a breath, man. Breathe,” Bob cooed to him.
But it was hard for any of them to breathe. Bucky had a worm in his arm. A big fat one. Or maybe it was more of a centipede. It was hard to tell in all the blood.
The thing shifted and Ava reached for the lidocaine again.
“You sure you’re drug resistant?” she asked Barnes.
He gave a weak nod of the head, cracking his eyes open to frown at her.
“Good. I’m going to kill it. Unless anyone has any better ideas?” Ava looked at them all. They were all blood splattered now and wide-eyed.
“Maybe I can just pull it…” Yelena used forceps to give it an experimental tug and Bucky sucked in a breath.
“Kill it,” he moaned. “Just kill it.”
Ava filled the syringe and plunged it directly into the thing. Then she injected the lidocaine into Bucky’s muscles, hoping the thing would absorb it somehow there too; and maybe ease a little of his pain. She went through two vials before Bucky visibly relaxed.
“Is it working? Can you feel anything?”
“It won’t last,” Bucky muttered. “Is it dead?”
Yelena tugged at the creature again. There was some resistance for half a moment and then…then it slowly pulled free with a wet sucking sound – all five limp inches of it.
She held it up for all of them to see.
More like a caterpillar, Ava finally decided. A blue, blood-streaked caterpillar with sharp looking feet and some nasty looking pinchers. It was covered in clear, fine spines.
“What the hell you guys?” came a new voice from behind them.
“Oh, hey Mel,” Yelena greeted brightly.
Val’s assistant stared at the mess, at them, at the freaky blue caterpillar, at all the blood. And then she promptly fainted.
“Oh. Oh uh…oops,” Yelena grimaced. “Somebody should probably go help her…”
Hours later, they were back in HQ. Walker and her father had dragged up the comfortable chairs from the office and they sprawled. Bucky was flat on his back on the sofa, his arm freshly stitched and bandaged, his skin still ashen from the blood loss.
He was shaken. They all were, but they were more keenly aware now of how badly Bucky must be shaken. He didn’t even try to pretend to be fine and that made them all just a little bit gentler – Walker got Bucky’s pillow from his bedroom, Alexei draped an old thrift-store quilt over top of him, Ava brought him her peppermint oil to try and help ease the headache he had. Yelena came from the kitchen with a fresh cold pack and laid it on his arm for him, swapping out the warm one. Cold, he insisted, would at least numb the pain for a while.
Mel had come around quickly, to her credit. But they insisted she stay and hang out with them for a while, just in case.
More food was ordered – Chinese, as if that somehow complimented the pancakes and bacon.
“Anyone else expecting some really bad nightmares tonight?” Yelena asked idly as she sat down in the chair that they’d saved for her. She crumbled bacon into her noodles and mixed it together with her chopsticks. “Because this will probably live in my trauma hole for a really long time.”
Bucky raised his metal hand. “Same.”
She winced sympathetically. “Man, I’m so sorry…”
“What even was that thing?” Mel asked.
“It was in the research tent,” Bucky supplied wearily. “I remember something hitting me but then the explosion…” He shook his head. “I didn’t see what it was.”
“Botfly,” Walker announced. He had his phone out “Botfly larvae burrow into the skin of a human or animal and grow there. So says ChatGPT. These terrorists were doing genetic experiments. So my money’s on the botfly.”
“That’s disgusting.” Ava shuddered.
“I would prefer we not talk about burrowing larvae,” Bucky insisted, his nose wrinkled.
“I’ll send it to a lab,” Mel promised. “I’m also going to talk to our research team and see if we can’t come up with a better option for anesthesia for the team. One that’s… y’know, accessible.”
Yelena heaved a sigh. “Thank you, Mel. Bob, you okay over there?”
He was sitting on the floor by the coffee table, quiet, contemplative, but in the group circle. “I’m ok.”
“Dad, how about you?” She looked over at her father.
“I was just thinking about the time when I got bitten by a giant centipede in the desert on a mission back in the days of glory,” he said with a rogue grin. “Hurt so bad, I peed myself.”
“Oh, dad, that’s not—”
“But I crushed it in my bare hands and fed it’s guts to the jackals!” He cackled.
This earned a bemused snort from the Winter Soldier on the sofa.
“What were you doing in the desert?” Walker asked with a smirk.
And that launched Alexei into a tale that was both impressive and absurd and as they all laughed or jeered, Yelena was able to relax. She looked over at Bob and he gave her knowing smile and a nod.
That night, long after Mel had left, they camped out in HQ and stayed up as long as any of them could manage. And when the nightmares started, they were there for each other, and only felt a little stupid.
It was a messy start but they got there in the end. It was excellent group therapy*.
*family time