Chapter Text
Six months after the whole mess with the Flagsmashers, Bucky’s life is going pretty well, apart from the headaches.
He’s doing meaningful, important work with Sam as they get the Avengers Initiative up and running again, slowly building up a team while working with Rhodey, Pepper Potts, and Maria Hill to establish the Avengers as an official, sanctioned superhero team that still has independence. He has Sam as a partner and coworker, and as their little team of Avengers slowly grows, he has Sam as a team leader too. Better still, Bucky has Sam as a friend and roommate. Brooklyn proves to be a hell of a lot less lonely with Sam around, and an arrangement that had started out of convenience—Brooklyn is a lot closer to the still under-construction Avengers compound than Delacroix or DC are—has become permanent because for all that they bicker, neither of them much like living alone.
For the first time in longer than Bucky can remember, he’s—well, not quite happy, but he’s content. Comfortable, both in his own skin and in his life. Comfortable enough to go out ungloved without feeling like a freak, and settled enough to actually start living in his and Sam’s apartment rather than just existing in it.
Things are going well, really. Except for the goddamn headaches.
Bucky rubs at his forehead, and when that doesn’t ease the sharp throb behind his eyes, he massages his temples instead, then does some neck stretches. None of it helps. The headache aches on, just as it has for the past couple of hours.
He’d been fine during training earlier, had even enjoyed the rounds of sparring with Torres and Yelena while Sam watched on, heckling. Bucky goes down his mental checklist: he’s not hungry and he’s eaten plenty today, same for hydration. He isn’t injured, the few bruises from sparring are already fading, and he’s gotten a solid five or six hours of sleep a night for most of the past week.
“Hey, you okay?” asks Sam from the workstation beside him. “You didn’t take a hit to the head earlier, did you?”
“No, it’s just a headache. Too much looking at screens, maybe,” Bucky says, squinting at the screen in question, which is admittedly more of a screen and holographic display combined.
Yeah, maybe that’s it. He and Sam have been going over intel reports on potential new Avengers in the shiny new Avengers ops room, and they’ve been at it for a few hours now. Maybe Bucky needs to switch back to good old-fashioned paper files, no bright screens.
“Or maybe you need glasses, old man,” teases Sam, but his gaze is sharp with concern. His eyes dart between Bucky and their work, clearly conflicted. “None of this is really urgent, we can knock off for the day, head back home. I was about to call it a day anyway.”
Yeah, right. It’s a rare night that they’re out of here before 7 or 8. Maybe their current project isn’t urgent the way an upcoming mission is, but Sam has been working hard on finding and building a new team, both of them putting in long hours to find and vet qualified people and to build up the Avengers again from almost scratch. It took Fury over a decade to get the Avengers going, Sam had said when they’d first started working on this. We haven’t got that kind of time. And Sam’s not wrong about that. It’s only a matter of time before some threat pops up that’s beyond the ability of two guys with wings and two former assassins to handle, and it’s gonna be sooner rather than later if it becomes too obvious that the Avengers aren’t ready.
“No, you don’t have to,” Bucky tells Sam. “I’ll just—print this shit out, it’s fine—“
Bucky turns back to the screen in front of him and can’t help his flinch as the bright light turns into what might as well be an ice pick to his brain. He squints and starts queueing up some print jobs, and just moving the mouse around is enough to give him a sudden surge of nausea. He stops and closes his eyes to ride it out.
“No, c’mon, we’ve put in a full workday and this can wait until tomorrow, we can clock out. As Captain America, I declare that Avenging is strictly 9 to 5 when we’re not actively saving the world.”
This is a patently untrue statement, and Bucky tells Sam so. “9 to 5 my ass, we pull double shifts all the time. I demand a union,” he says, as Sam chivvies him out of the ops room.
“You know, that’s not a bad idea, a superhero union—“
They toss the idea back and forth with varying degrees of seriousness on the train ride back to Brooklyn, and while the conversation does nothing to soothe the increasingly harsh pain in Bucky’s head, it does at least distract him until they get home, where the pain rushes in as if it’s only been waiting for Bucky to cross the threshold into the apartment.
He sways on his feet, close to falling right there if not for Sam bracing him, his eyes closed against—well, not the light, they haven’t even turned that on yet, have they, but everything feels so bright anyway—
“Hey, easy now, let’s just get you to bed, okay?” comes Sam’s voice, from very far away.
“Too bright,” Bucky mutters, though he’s pretty sure the lights are still off, and lets Sam guide him to his bedroom.
“Migraine, huh? Yeah, I figured, the way you’ve been squinting. Alright, that’s okay, we’ll keep the lights off for now.”
Sam keeps talking, his voice low and soothing, but the throbbing in Bucky’s head overtakes Sam’s words. The pain finally eases a little bit when Sam gets him into bed, enough that Bucky can mumble something about sleeping it off. He’s vaguely aware of Sam puttering around his bedroom—tugging Bucky’s boots off, getting him under the covers, closing the curtains—is Sam going to stay? Bucky wouldn’t mind if Sam stayed, though he has some hazy sense that there’s a reason he shouldn’t tell Sam that he wants him to stay, because maybe comfort and company won’t be enough of a cover for how much Bucky wants—and then the pain finally drags him down to sleep.
His dreams are strange.
They’re dreams, for one thing, and that’s a rarity. Bucky’s sleep usually overflows with memories, and the shift to the surreality of true dreams is always disquieting. He wakes in the night a few times, his head pulsing painfully with strange images: a big room lit up in blood red, a vast desert with a dust storm swelling on the horizon, an empty city block suffused with smoke and dread. Each time he wakes between dreams, sleep tugs him back under, muffling a steadily ebbing pain.
When Bucky wakes up in the morning, he’s starving, but his head feels better. He stumbles out to the kitchen, and chugs down the first protein shake he finds in the fridge, and then he gets started on making actual breakfast. The throb of pain returns a few times as he does, a dull echo of the previous day’s sharp ache, but it passes once he eats, so he’s not too worried.
Bucky’s on his second serving of eggs and toast when Sam comes into the kitchen. Despite months of living together, Sam looking so effortlessly good first thing in the morning continues to be offensive to Bucky’s sensibilities, to say nothing of the havoc he wreaks on Bucky’s unruly heart. Sam’s always got this kind of glow of good health and all around goodness. Bucky feels like an ancient gremlin in comparison, even if Sam generally seems inexplicably delighted by Bucky’s bleary morning grumpiness.
“Hey, you look like you’re feeling better this morning.”
This is kind of Sam to say, given that Bucky’s pretty sure his hair is a disaster and that there are still huge pillow creases on his face. Or maybe he’d just looked that rough last night.
“Yeah, I am, thanks,” Bucky says. “Sorry about last night.”
“Nah man, nothing to be sorry for,” says Sam, his tone easy. “Maybe we gotta adjust the brightness settings or something on those screens. Or maybe something else at the compound triggered a migraine for you?”
“Maybe,” Bucky says, and shrugs. His head’s a fucking mess from all the cryo and brain frying, he’s used to odd headaches and weird sensations, and that’s not even counting the strain on his neck from the prosthetic, which can lead to vicious tension headaches. It had all been really bad, right after Insight, bad enough that he’d thought he was dying, and then only wished he was when his body stubbornly kept on living. Yesterday’s headache barely rated, compared to that, so he says, “I’m fine now. It’s probably nothing.”
“You sure? You could take the day off, all we’ve got planned for the day is that meeting with Hill, and then it’s just going through a lot more files, I can handle it,” says Sam as he takes a seat at the breakfast bar.
Bucky has no doubt that he can, but he shouldn’t have to, not when Bucky’s his XO.
“I’m sure,” Bucky says, eyeing the tension around Sam’s mouth that’s starting to take up permanent residence there like a premonition of wrinkles. He pours Sam some coffee, adding Sam’s preferred two spoonfuls of sugar and splash of creamer, and passes it over to him. “Though I’m starting to think we oughta just be winging this whole putting together a team thing. It worked for the Howlies.”
Sam raises an eyebrow as he blows on his coffee. “Yeah? Well, you got any more skilled friends you made in a prison camp hanging around, feel free to recommend ‘em.”
“I’m just saying, maybe we should try out the ‘if you build it, they will come’ strategy for the Avengers,” Bucky says as he plates up some eggs for Sam.
“Field of Dreams? I do not understand a damn thing about your pop culture catch up choices,” Sam says with a shake of his head.
“I like baseball,” is Bucky’s bland retort. “And I’m just saying, it’s worked out with Yelena so far.”
“That wasn’t any kind of ‘if you build it, they will come’ nonsense, that was pure and simple nepotism,” says Sam. “I can’t be relying on secret Avenger siblings to keep showing up looking for jobs.”
Sam’s tone is light, but there’s a just barely perceptible edge to it, and Bucky slides a plate of eggs and toast over to Sam in silent apology. The responsibility of forming a new team is weighing heavy on Sam, Bucky knows. Sam has steady confidence in his role as Captain America, handling everything from PR to missions with straight-backed ease and even a kind of joy. But being Cap is more than just the already weighty symbolism: in the wake of all the original Avengers retiring or dying, it means building and leading the team too, and that’s no easy task in a still chaotic world. Bucky wishes this could be as easy as telling Steve about the best and brightest men who’d survived Azzano and then Kreischberg. Instead, he’s left chasing rumors of enhanced vigilantes in the hopes that any of them might be willing to throw in with the new Cap, and Sam’s wrangling with the GRC about the Avengers’ continued relevance.
As hard as it is now, Bucky’s got faith. This is Sam. Who wouldn’t want to be on his team? They’ll cobble together a bigger team soon enough.
“Let’s just hope it’s not gonna take another alien invasion to bring a team together, ‘cause you definitely don’t wanna follow in Steve’s footsteps on that score,” Bucky says, and Sam laughs.
“Yeah, no,” he says, and squints down at his eggs. “Hand me the hot sauce, will you?”
Bucky makes a disgusted noise—it’s too damn early in the morning for hot sauce—but he grabs the hot sauce from the fridge and hands it over to Sam anyway, their fingers brushing when he does. Bucky’s pulse gives a warning kind of throb in his head, almost but not quite pain, and he tries to suppress his flinch.
Sam notices, and he gives Bucky another keen look. “You’re sure you’re fine?”
“I’m sure, I swear I’m feeling fine,” Bucky tells him. He’s not lying: his head doesn’t even hurt, not really. “I’ll tap out if I get another headache, okay? Hey, you were planning to try and track down that guy from that bus fight video today, right? I was thinking we could ask Dr. Strange—”
Bucky is fine, for a few days anyway. The next headache hits on one of their precious days off, which is just adding insult to injury. He and Sam had been having a good, easy day too, nothing more demanding than hitting up the farmer’s market for their weekly grocery shopping, and then wandering through a pop-up craft market, which Sam declares to be some hipster bullshit before perusing each booth’s wares closely.
"Christmas is next month, I should probably start getting gifts, huh,” Sam says, eyeing a chunky hand-knitted scarf in an intense shade of dark green. “You think Yelena would like this?”
“Hmm, maybe,” says Bucky, doing his own examination of the knitted wares on display. Who needs a one-foot long orange, knitted sofa? He pokes carefully at it, and thinks of cats for some reason. Is this a cat couch? Cute.
“You’re invited, by the way.”
Bucky looks up from the tiny sofa. “What?”
“You’re invited,” repeats Sam. “To Thanksgiving, Christmas, all the holidays. You have a standing invite to the Wilson family celebrations.”
Sam’s not looking at him, he’s busy examining the scarves on display, which is good, because Bucky’s not sure he can control whatever embarrassingly transparent and overly emotional thing is happening on his face right now. Bucky had spent the holidays alone last year, and it had been—well. It had been pretty bad. Being back in Brooklyn, alone, for the first holiday season when he had his mind back more or less, had been—anyway.
“Okay,” he says, instead of something embarrassing but true like I love you, and even the one word comes out too rough and teary. He clears his throat and continues, more steadily now, “Thanks. But, uh, just how many holidays are on the Wilson family calendar—“
Now Sam turns to look at him, grinning wide enough for the gap between his front teeth to show. I love you crowds behind Bucky’s closed lips again, and he swallows it down like always, accustomed to the words’ beloved bittersweetness by now. For the first time in a long, long time, Bucky has a good thing going. He’s not about to ruin it by imposing too much on Sam.
“Why, you gotta check your calendar? You got other pressing engagements?” asks Sam.
“I’m just saying, is this a Christmas and Easter kind of deal, or are we talking, I don’t know, Arbor Day, the Fourth of July, Mardi Gras—“
“Not Mardi Gras,” interrupts Sam, and Bucky blinks, taken aback by the edge in Sam’s tone.
“Oh. Uh, I thought that was kind of a big deal in Louisiana, sorry—“
“It is. Just, uh—Sarah’s husband, Alex, he died during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, back in 2017. There were these riots, some kinda gas leak—so. We don’t really celebrate anymore. Brings up too many bad memories for Sarah, you know?”
“I’m sorry,” says Bucky, and puts a hand on Sam’s back in a probably-useless attempt at comfort.
Maybe not so useless, actually, because Sam turns to smile at him, sadder this time, but still a smile.
“Anyway, holidays: you’re comin’ to all of ‘em. Which means you gotta help cook on Thanksgiving, and you gotta get presents for everyone for Christmas.”
Sam puts an arm around Bucky’s shoulders and guides him to the next booth, this one full of boldly painted ceramics. Bucky leans against him, as helplessly as a flower bending towards the sun.
Sam’s got a good point about Christmas presents, so Bucky follows along happily enough, picking up this or that to examine it: smooth little wooden bird figurines that put him in mind of sunshine, for some reason, as the sound of humming and the rasp of sandpaper fills his head; a bar of soap that’s more art than toiletry, sculpted as it is into a flower blossom, the soap briefly overlaid by an actual flower in his mind’s eye, pink and in full bloom; some handmade, leather-bound notebooks that he actually likes enough to buy, already imagining how he’ll fill the blank pages, along with a set of clever little fidget toys for AJ.
He’s just taking his change back from the seller when a too-familiar sharp pain behind his eyes starts to throb again, duller than it had been the last time, but still bright in his awareness.
“Did you forget your sunglasses again?” Sam asks as Bucky squints against a light that isn’t actually there on this cloudy fall day. Before Bucky can say anything, Sam whips his sunglasses off and settles them on Bucky’s face. “Your face is gonna get stuck in that dumb squinty look if you keep forgetting your sunglasses.”
Bucky scowls at Sam. The tinted sunglasses don’t ease the brightness that pulses through him somewhere other than in his eyes.
“That’s not—I’m just getting a headache, is all.”
Sam’s expression shifts from teasing to mildly concerned. “Yeah? Let’s head home then.”
“No, you stay, it’s fine, I’ll go—“
“Nah, I don’t need to be worrying about you passing the fuck out on the subway or something, here, let me call a cab—“
It’s a five-minute drive back to their apartment, barely worth the fare, but Sam insists, and Bucky has to admit he’s grateful for the cab’s cool, quiet interior. The pain isn’t so bad this time though, and when they get back home, Bucky curls up on the living room couch with his eyes closed and a cold washcloth on his forehead until it passes.
“You forget to hydrate today or something?” Sam asks, bringing him a bottle of gatorade.
“I don’t know,” Bucky says, and sips at the virulently orange drink. “Might’ve been some of that soap at the market, it smelled real strong.”
The 21st century has a lot of smells, many of them sharply chemical to Bucky’s enhanced nose. It usually doesn’t bother him much, doesn’t cause anything other than a slight pressure around his sinuses that goes away with some fresh air, but maybe the booth full of soaps and bath products had been too overwhelming for his stupidly sensitive nose.
Sam nods, the tension around his mouth easing. “Sarah can’t have scented candles in the house, you know, says they always trigger godawful headaches for her.”
“Got it, no scented candle Christmas presents for Sarah. Maybe you 21st century folks oughta just let things stink, if trying to make them smell nice is this annoying,” says Bucky, and Sam grins.
“Yeah, yeah, tell me more about all the good old-fashioned stank, Grandpa Barnes,” says Sam, and they both laugh, headache forgotten.
They fiddle with the settings on the screens in the compound, and Bucky avoids strong fragrances, but the headaches keep coming. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to them; sometimes they pass if Bucky just spends an hour in a dark, quiet room, and sometimes they lay him out for the better part of a day. Any painkillers short of elephant tranquilizers don’t work on his souped up system, so Bucky rides the headaches out as best he can. They feel the same every time: a keen, sharp pain behind his eyes, along with a sensation of brightness and fullness that isn’t anchored in any of Bucky’s actual senses.
He has a vague idea that he should be worried about this. The headaches are getting both more frequent and worse. There’s something wrong, there’s obviously something wrong with him, more than the usual, that is, but the certainty feels distant. With each headache, his body feels more and more far away, a heavy thing that alternately holds Bucky down or that he floats above. He touches things, and it’s like his brain can’t translate the sensation, his head filling with—he doesn’t know what. Noise. Light.
Something’s wrong, he thinks, but he doesn’t know what to do about it other than wait it out. It’s what he’d done before, after Insight: he’d waited out the shakes and seizures and pain, not much caring if he was alive at the end of it all, but he had lived. He probably will again. He considers telling Sam as much, and distills it down to, “It’ll pass.” Sam doesn’t seem particularly convinced. He tells Bucky to take it easy, to rest up. And life skips along between headaches, a blur of training and helping to get the compound up and running and reading reports whose words swim in front of Bucky’s eyes. It’ll pass, Bucky tells himself, and in the meantime, he can bear it.
The third time Bucky loses a whole day and night to a headache that won’t ease though, it doesn’t pass by the next morning. It must be late—did they have plans today? Bucky can’t remember, there’s not much room in his head for anything other than this goddamn headache—because Sam comes into Bucky’s bedroom to check on him.
“Buck, how you feeling?” he asks, his voice soft.
“Hurts,” Bucky manages to say, because it does, and it hasn’t stopped hurting since whenever this started, and he thinks maybe something is really wrong this time, but maybe if he just curls up small and quiet enough, it will go away.
“Buck. Bucky, hey. Look at me,” says Sam, his voice less soft now, and closer. “Bucky, open your eyes for me, man.”
Bucky absolutely does not want to do that, but Sam sounds really worried, and his hand feels good against Bucky’s face, so he makes an effort, and immediately regrets it. Everything goes bright, an explosion in his head, and he gets lost in it until he comes to again to the sensation of Sam trying to lift him out of bed.
“No,” Bucky manages to say, because this will pass, pain always does, eventually, but then he feels Sam and the sharpness of his fear and worry, the way they buzz urgently against Bucky’s skin, making him shiver.
Something’s wrong, Bucky remembers, and then is proven right when Sam says it too.
“Something’s wrong, Buck, we gotta get you checked out, okay? Bruce can help. So come on, let’s go, help me out here, man.”
Bucky goes without much protest, though unfortunately without much help with the going either, because operating his body is kind of difficult right now, which seems to worry Sam even more. Bucky considers making some token objection, just so Sam won’t have that pinched look around his mouth, but Bucky’s head still hurts and his hands feel weird and he can’t even really feel what his legs are doing right now, so he really just wants everything to stop, for a while. Anyway, Banner’s another casualty of the serum just like Bucky is. Bucky’s usual distrust of doctors doesn’t much apply when the doctor’s a fellow science experiment.
Time slides away in a haze of pain and light and movement, and Sam’s increasingly worried voice, and when Bucky properly comes to again, it’s to Sam carefully depositing him on one of the Avengers compound’s infirmary exam tables.
Banner takes blood and runs tests, asks Bucky questions. Where is the pain, what’s it like, does he know what day it is—which, no, and that is bad, Bucky is distantly aware—does he know what year it is—2024, probably? Or maybe 2023, honestly, it’s really hard to keep track—can he do these math problems, can he look at this light, can he read this chart, blah blah blah. The questions are easy enough, for the most part, though it’s hard to focus through the pain. Banner sticks some electrodes on his head, and mutters something about how it’s not seizures, and his tox screen came up clear, which, yeah, Bucky could’ve told him that, but then it’s time for more tests and scans.
He gets in the big brain scanning machine, and Bucky can feel himself slipping away somewhere—else. Somewhere else, because this is bad, and it’s small inside the machine, and it’s loud and it’s not buzzing, it’s not the chair, he knows it’s not the fucking chair, and it’s not cold, it’s not the cryochamber, but it’s small and it’s so loud, the banging is the machine working but it also feels like it’s battering his body, his throbbing head, and he doesn’t want—everything just keeps hurting—
But then Sam slips his hand into Bucky’s—his real hand, the right one—and Bucky’s head clears, the pain flaring hot and bright for a moment before resolving into something more calm. Sam’s really worried, Bucky can tell just from the grip of his hand, so he squeezes back.
“I’m okay,” he tells Sam. This is almost certainly stretching the truth to the breaking point. “Doesn’t hurt as bad now.”
“Stay still, Bucky,” Banner says. “Just a few more minutes and the scan will be finished.”
Holding Sam’s hand helps, which is faintly embarrassing, but whatever. It’s nicer to think of clear skies and the waters around Delacroix than it is to think of the machine and the pain in his head, so he does, until the scan’s done. When Sam lets go of his hand, the sensation of sky and sea go away, replaced with the significantly less soothing reality of the Avengers compound’s infirmary, which is shiny and brand new, empty save for them—except no, it isn’t, it’s rubble, and alarms are going off—or no, it’s whole again, and filled with people Bucky doesn’t recognize—
“Bucky, you with us? Buck, hey, talk to me,” says Sam, his eyes big and intent on Bucky, and oh, shit, he’s really fucking worried. Has Bucky lost time again? He must have, because he was in the machine and now he isn’t, and something’s wrong something’s wrong something’s wrong.
“I’m here, sorry, yeah,” Bucky tells Sam, then turns to Banner. Carefully, because he can’t really feel his body right now, other than the pounding in his head. “What’s the verdict, Doc?”
“Well, you’re not having seizures, and there are no lesions or masses in your brain, no aneurysms or clots either. Uh, no lesions other than the ones that were already there, that is, according to your scans. There are fewer of them, actually, so your brain’s still healing after, uh—you know, HYDRA. As far as my scans tell me, your brain’s fine, better than your last baseline, even.”
“Bruce, something is obviously wrong,” says Sam, and Bucky would nod, if he wasn’t worried about the motion making his head explode in a fresh round of agony. “He’s in pain, and he’s barely coherent right now, he’s been more and more out of it these last couple of weeks, sometimes it’s like he’s not even tracking what’s going on around him—”
Has he been that out of it? Bucky wonders. He guesses so. The last couple weeks are kind of a blur, to be honest. That’s bad, probably.
“I know, I hear you, Sam, and I do see it. His cognitive function is fine though, apart from him being in so much pain and not really knowing when he is, which, honestly, can’t really blame him for that one, given the givens,” says Banner with a grimace.
“Thanks, I guess,” says Bucky. “So, can I go?”
Because if he’s gonna keep being in miserable amounts of pain, he’d prefer to at least be in bed in a nice, dark room.
“Go where to do what?” demands Sam. “Bruce, there’s gotta be something you can do.”
“I can give him some pain meds that should work on him, though they’ll pretty much knock him out too. If there’s something wrong with his brain though, my scan’s aren’t showing it. But listen, I’m concerned there’s maybe something up with the neural interface for his prosthetic.”
“What, how would his prosthetic be causing all of this?” asks Sam.
“The neural interface is complex, and it’s hooked up directly to his nervous system and brain. If something’s on the fritz there, it could be causing other neurological issues. I’m out of my depth when it comes to that, Princess Shuri will have to take a look, but if you want my best guess, that’s what’s going on.”
“Should we take his prosthetic off?” Sam asks, and no, no, Bucky does not want that, and says so. He doesn’t need more parts of him to disappear, he feels insubstantial enough already. “Okay, so we go to Wakanda,” says Sam, and gets up.
“What, right now?” Bucky asks as Sam puts an arm around his shoulders and guides him out of the infirmary. Sam’s arm feels more real than Bucky’s own body does, so he leans into Sam’s touch, lets his pounding head rest on Sam’s shoulder.
“Yeah, Buck, right now,” says Sam, and oh, that’s his very serious, very worried voice. “Come on.”
“I’m okay though, it doesn’t hurt as much anymore,” Bucky tries, because he thinks he can ride it out now, he can see the distant horizon where the pain will ease.
“That’s good, but we gotta figure this out, okay? You keep saying it’ll pass, but it’s not, Buck, it’s getting worse, and you’re—you’re not in good shape right now, okay? I’m worried something’s really wrong.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“It’s not your fault, just—let’s get Shuri to check you out, alright?”
“Okay,” he says, then stumbles against Sam when they turn into another hallway.
“Shit, maybe I should get you on a gurney—“
“I can walk,” Bucky insists, because he’s upright so that must be what his legs are doing.
He can’t walk all that well, apparently, he thinks distantly, stumbling again, and he brings up a hand to brace himself against the wall, and then—then—
The wall is shaking and crumbling and there are alarms and there is roaring and then the wall is being built and then the hallway is full and then it’s empty and then it’s full of rubble and then it’s not and there are people—not people, ghosts, because that’s Steve and Natasha, and he sees them, Steve is walking right past, but Bucky can’t reach him, can’t touch—there are more people then, and they seem familiar but he doesn’t know them and god, he just needs everything to stop—
“Bucky! Bucky, hey, stay with me, Bucky—oh fuck—Bruce, help!”
The dark behind Bucky’s eyes isn’t dark any more, it’s full of light, and it just keeps getting brighter and brighter—