Pre War Bucky Barnes One Shots

The Waiting Room

You feel like your heart has shattered into thousands of tiny little pieces and splintered throughout your chest, causing you excruciating pain and making it hard to breath. You feel like your world has come crashing down, because he is your world... Well, was now. Without him, you can't imagine your life ever being as good as it was whenever you were with him.

It's not specifically a room that you're in, in fact you're outside. But the tension and nerves in the air are so dense and suffocating that it feels like you are trapped inside a small space. It's pretty much a waiting room, a hospital one. You're waiting for patients to come in, waiting for news, waiting for the sick and injured. Everyone is anxious and on edge, everyone is quiet. Before they even arrived you knew something was up. They were taking too long, longer than they should've been. Now you know why.

You knew it from the look on everyone's faces as they piled out of the army pickup truck. The downcast eyes, the subtle head shakes from Gabe, Dum Dum and Falsworth. You don't need to be told.

The look on Steve's face as he slowly shuffles out a little way behind the rest of them, a torn, woollen blanket wrapped around his slumped shoulders, a blank, empty, heartbroken expression on his face, his eyes glassy and red, only confirms your dreaded suspicion.

But you need to hear it to believe it.

You lock eyes with Steve for a millisecond. And maybe it's because he knows you want to know, or maybe he feels the need to get it off his chest, or maybe it's just the mere fact that you're the only person he has left who he can fully trust.

Before he has even reached you your stomach goes crashing right to the ground and your breath catches in your throat. You freeze.

As Steve comes closer to you and stands before you, you want to ask but you just can't get the words out. You're not sure if it's because you're scared of the answer or because you already know it and you're just so shocked. But in the end it doesn't matter, because Steve answers for you.

"He's not coming back." He croaks out, his voice hollow and ragged, his gaze averted to the ground.

For such a big strong man, he looks like he's about to break if you even just poke him.

You press your lips into a thin line and furrow your brow as you squeeze your eyes shut and nod almost robotically in an attempt to hold yourself together. Even though all you want to do is fall apart, you can't do it here, not now, not where everyone can see. You can't let them know what the two of you had.

"Come on Captain. Lets get you cleaned up," you say hoarsely and turn to head towards the medical tent with him in tow.

You've known Steve for a long time. You were his nurse way back when he was a scrawny, ill little boy back in Brooklyn, since before his parents had passed away. All it was was him coming in for weekly check ups and health tests and sometimes you doing the odd house visit when he was bedridden. Sure, you shared many conversations and and secrets and did get to be very close friends as you do with most people your age that you spend a lot of time with and get to know well. But apparently it meant more to you than him than you initially thought because when he was signed up for the super soldier experiment he specifically requested that you come along for the journey and remain his nurse rather than some stranger.

In hindsight you went through a lot with him, both the deaths of his parents and by the sounds of it he only really had one friend besides you, but they went off to war a while before Steve's transformation. He'd told you all about this man Bucky, but you'd never met him and little did you know that he would turn out to be the love of your life.