Run (A Bucky Barnes Recovery Story)

43 Morning

When Natasha returned to the hospital the next day, Bucky took the first opportunity he could to get her alone and tell her about his and Steve’s discovery. It wasn’t necessarily that he wanted anyone else to know, but he felt scared and sickened and talking to Natasha helped him. And after all, she needed to know, she deserved to know. She’d stuck with him this far.

“I feel…,” Bucky said, pacing the hospital room, his hand on the back of his neck, and starting again. “I didn’t want this. Steve says it’s a good thing and I guess it could be worse, but I feel like… An experiment, I dunno, I don’t like it.” Natasha sat on his bed and watched him go back and forth and she stood after he said this and stopped his pacing, taking him by the shoulders and turning him to face her.

“I understand,” she said and wrapped him in a hug and he rested his cheek on the top of her head, his arm around her back and tried to breathe, tried to let himself be comforted. “I’m so sorry, Bucky.”

“Do you think I should be grateful?” Bucky asked hollowly and Natasha squeezed him.

“I think if you were anything but outraged about whatever Hydra did to you, helpful or not, I would think you had lost it,” Natasha said and Bucky let out a breath. After a minute, she let him go and he backed up and didn’t know how to thank her for listening to him, for always listening to him.

Later that day, doctors approached him and took blood out of his hand and he was told that he could leave the hospital now, since he was better, and they would call him with the results about his blood in a week. Steve and Natasha were still wary about letting Bucky return to his apartment, but by his count, he figured he had already spent much too much time in a horrible hospital and he deserved time to sit comfortably in his own apartment. He would have that time, even if he had to fight off every attack possible, Hydra be damned.

So Bucky returned to his apartment and Steve and Natasha joined him. They hadn’t exactly asked permission, but Bucky wasn’t about to kick them out. In the end, he determined, their presence was a comfort, as it had been in the hospital, and he became glad that they had followed him so closely. And after all, he remembered his promise to Steve. Steve could stay in his apartment whenever he wanted and Bucky wouldn’t say anything. While Bucky curled up on his bed in the next room, relishing the quiet of being home, Natasha made herself comfortable with the television on his couch and Steve accidentally fell asleep in Bucky’s armchair just outside his bedroom.

When Bucky rose some time in the middle of the night that night, driven awake by the screaming electric pain in his non-existant left arm, he passed Steve, situated right outside his door with his head falling at an awkward angle. Bucky stopped and looked at him for a minute, pitied the crick he would have in his neck the next morning and gathered Steve one or two more pillows to fix the problem. Bucky learned, while resituating pillows under Steve’s head, that Steve was a very, very heavy sleeper.

Natasha, he knew, was not, but he found her curled up on his couch, the TV still on, although it was muted. The colors it threw silently around the dark room was slightly unnerving to Bucky, so he switched it off completely and left Natasha in darkness. He did find her a blanket however, and then returned to his room, where he sat on his bed, his memory journal open in front of him, rubbing his left shoulder and staring frustratedly at the next blank page until the sun rose.

When it became painfully plain to Bucky that he had nothing new to say in his journal that morning, he got off of his bed and began doing exercises to pass the time as the phantom pain began to subside. He wasn’t quite sure of the shape he was in and if he was going to work with Natasha towards finding Hydra, he had to be fit. It was hard, doing push-ups with only one hand, but he managed enough to feel good about himself and then moved on to different types of crunches he could remember until he heard groaning and stretching and waking sounds outside of his door.