Don't You Worry Child

Stronger Than Me

Chapter Summary: Frustrated with what happened to Steve, Samantha decides to interrogate Bucky but he may need some persuasion before he talks.

Soundtrack: Stronger Than Me by Connie Britton

She watched as – all too suddenly – the heart monitor showed a flat line and the number 0. All Samantha Stark could do was watch and scream out the word 'No' as she was dragged away, kicking and screaming from the scene before her. This wasn't how it was supposed to end, it wasn't how she wanted it all to end so how could her life with Steve be – potentially – ending with one flat line on a screen?

She felt like she was going to throw up, she wanted to scream again, to-to go back in there again and yell at them to do something. Steve could be dying in there and there was nothing she could do. She'd seen that flat line, she had watched enough medical dramas to know what that meant. It meant that Steve could die at any second and that thought terrified her more than she would like to admit. As much as her inner feminist would hate her for it, she needed Steve, he was her rock, her grounding, her home in a sense.

She wasn't sure who had dragged her out of that OR but she wanted back in, she knew that those doctors were competent but she wanted to be certain that they were doing all they could to bring him back to her. She settled for pacing the floor, tears streaming down her face, not caring who saw her in such a state.

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"The bullet... it's like some kind of booby trap, it's got poison in it. If we take it out, he gets poisoned and winds up dead and, with the size of the pneumothorax it's caused, if we leave it in he dies too," she heard one of the doctors tell her and she felt as though her heart had leapt up into her throat.

"There has to be some way, some kind of treatment you could give him, an antidote, something," Samantha pleaded with the doctor stood before her – the one wearing the ferry boat scrub cap. Her eyes filled with tears again, tears she hadn't thought there had been enough water in her body for her to be able to cry.

"Until we find out what type of poison it is we can't figure out which antidote to use, the only real way we'd be able to figure out what kind of poison it is, is to take the bullet out, allow it to be released into his bloodstream and do a tox screen on it. The problem is that by the time we'd have gotten the results back, he'd probably be dead," the doctor explained and she nodded, trying to process the information that had just been relayed to her.

"What about antitoxin? I... I've heard that works," she asked nervously, completely unsure as to why she would be nervous.

"There are certain poisons that engineered to react to anti-toxin and become stronger in the face of it if that makes any sense," he answered and she nodded once again before the doctor began to speak to her again "I hate to ask this but I have to... Has Captain Rogers ever spoken to you about extraordinary measures?"

She had to wrack her brain for an answer, it was a conversation so important that you'd think you'd remember having it but she couldn't. There had been so many conversations she could remember, she knew his blood type (O Negative), how many bones he had broken in his life so far (both arms twice and three ribs), the fact that he'd gotten a concussion once when he was thirteen, the fact that he was allergic to every kind of Morphine imaginable, she could remember his entire medical history off bat but she couldn't remember whether he would want extraordinary measures to be taken. Then she remembered a conversation they'd had not long after she'd first moved into Stark Tower. They were in Central Park, strolling down the walkway and he said something, something that seemed to stick in her mind now 'I know I missed out on a lot while I was frozen but if I got a do over on it I wouldn't take it' the words had seemed so benign and banal at the time, just another of Steve's mutterings, she could remember giggling at it, she never thought that she might use it as evidence for his wanting extraordinary measures but still, that was what she was about to do "He'd want them taken," she said, her voice monotone, not even a flicker of emotion available to it.