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griseldabanks · 8 months

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For the count the ways ask game: Steve and Bucky, "You're my idiot".

Let Me Count the Ways ask game

“You sure you're gonna be okay?” Bucky asked for the fifth time.

Steve waved weakly at him from the mound of blankets he'd burrowed under on the bed. “Not gonna croak just 'cause you went to work,” he sniffled.

“I dunno, you sound pretty croaky to me,” Bucky said, wrapping his scarf around his neck and pulling on his gloves as he looked critically at his best friend's bleary-eyed gaze. It wasn't a good joke, and Steve didn't laugh. Not that he would have laughed even if Bucky had told the best zinger anyone had ever thought up, probably.

“Get outta here,” Steve mumbled. “I'll be fine.”

“Okay.” Bucky reluctantly backed out of the bedroom. “I left you extra water. And some books. And I'll come straight home from work.”

“I know, Buck.”

“Just...don't do anything stupid until I come back, all right?”

Steve started to reply, but broke into a coughing fit before he could finish. Bucky hesitated on the threshold, but Steve waved him impatiently away, so Bucky closed the bedroom door and headed out, chased by the sounds of Steve's hacking cough.

Bucky hurried down the stairs and down the street; he was already late, and he knew he would get an earful once he got to work. But he just couldn't shake the worry. All the way to work, in every idle moment throughout the day, his thoughts kept returning to Steve—especially when he glanced out the window at lunch and saw snow blowing past.

Maybe the worry was ingrained into him after all these years, like a habit he'd never be able to shake. Steve made it really easy to worry about him, notwithstanding all of his protests and reassurances. Besides, this had been a particularly hard year. This winter was bitterly cold, and money was tight. The summer had been brutally hot, as well—so hot you could feel your brain melting, and that hadn't done wonders for Steve's health either.

And...the other thing. The thing they never talked about. The emptiness in Steve's life since that awful, awful day.

Maybe we should talk about it, Bucky mused as he trudged back home at the end of the day, bowing his head against the wind that drove snowflakes like icy spears against his skin. Maybe it's worse because we never bring it up. If we could just...talk about her. Remember the good things. Maybe then...he could let her go. Move on.

Bucky knew nothing was ever going to be the same, not without Miss Sarah. But there was still a lingering deadness in Steve's eyes sometimes, like he wasn't really there. Like he was floating away, like he was going to meet his mother again in a place Bucky couldn't follow.

With a sigh of relief, Bucky stepped through the front door to the apartment he shared with Steve, which was dark and silent in the winter evening. He stamped the slush off his shoes as quietly as he could and didn't call out, hoping that the quiet meant Steve was sleeping.

But as he pulled off his scarf, he glanced up and froze. The door to the bedroom stood ajar. The room inside was dark, but Bucky could make out the blankets thrown back.

The bed was empty.

With a curse, Bucky turned on his heel and bolted back out the door. He tore down the stairs and back out into the street, squinting into the snow blowing harder and harder in his face. “Steve!” he called, but there was no response.

Picking a direction at random, Bucky hurried up the street. There weren't many people on the sidewalk, not in this weather. They all seemed to be hustling homeward, heads bent against the wind.

As the seconds ticked by and Bucky still didn't find Steve huddling in any of the doorways or alleys he frantically searched, dread filled Bucky's chest like the icy gasps of air in his lungs. Steve was sick. He'd been running a fever for days, and if he'd come out on a day like this, he could already be....

Cupping his hands around his mouth, Bucky screamed, “Steve!” He kept going, slipping and sliding on the ice forming on the sidewalk, running aimlessly and howling Steve's name as loud as he could, as if to banish the terror bubbling up inside him.

In place of the fear, anger clouded his vision as much as the sleet pelting him. What was Steve thinking anyway, going for a walk on a day like this? He wouldn't last long out here even on one of his better days, but he was sick! And now Bucky had to stay out here looking for him, and he was probably going to catch his death, and then....

Bucky came to a sudden stop. He didn't think he'd heard anything—it would have been hard to hear even someone who was shouting on a day like this—but something drew his attention to the alleyway he'd just passed. He turned back, trying to shield his face with his arm as he squinted into the darkness next to Mr. Botticelli's butcher shop.

Was that...a shoe? Sticking out from behind the garbage cans, which had been overturned as if someone had stumbled against them....

“Steve!”

Bucky rushed forward, dropping to his knees next to a very familiar form wrapped in a coat. He lay sprawled on his face in a pile of half-frozen trash, without hat or gloves or scarf, lying awfully still. As Bucky rolled him over, he saw the deathly pallor of Steve's cheeks, grey from the cold.

“Stevie!” he cried, shaking him by the shoulders. “Come on, pal, don't do this to me! I told you not to be an idiot!”

Sluggishly, Steve cracked his eyes open and let out a weak cough. Bucky had never heard anything more wonderful in his life.

“Come on, let's get you home.” Bucky shrugged out of his coat and wrapped it around Steve's shoulders before heaving him up into his arms. He hated how easy it was. Steve didn't even make a token protest as Bucky picked him up like a baby and hurried back the way he'd come.

It was marginally easier to get back home, with the wind at his back the whole way. Bucky barely even noticed the snow and ice pelting his back and soaking him through to the skin. All he cared about was getting Steve home as fast as possible.

Finally, gasping for breath and shivering all over, Bucky stumbled up the last few steps and fumbled with the door to their apartment. He realized he hadn't even closed it all the way, in his haste to find Steve.

For the next few minutes, Bucky bustled around. He stripped off their sopping wet clothes and replaced them with clean, dry ones, tucking Steve back in bed under his mountain of blankets. He heated water for tea and a hot water bottle, but even with those heat sources, Steve was still shivering.

Bucky wasn't a nurse like Miss Sarah had been. He couldn't tell if the shivering was from the cold outside, or the fever within. He wasn't sure if he should be trying to warm Steve up or cool him off, but he couldn't stand to hear the way Steve's teeth kept chattering. So he crawled under the covers as well and pulled Steve closer, wrapping his arms and legs around him.

“Gonna catch what I've got,” Steve mumbled, but the shivers were already dying down.

“You don't get to lecture me, idiot,” Bucky said fiercely, resting his forehead against Steve's clammy temple. “What the hell were you doing out there?”

“Going to Mom.” Steve blinked blearily at him, like that was a perfectly normal thing to say.

“In a blizzard?” Bucky spluttered at him. “The cemetery's a mile away! What were you going to do, just walk there? You've got a fever, Steve! You can hardly make it to the toilet without keeling over!”

“I know, I...I wasn't...th-thinking straight....” He broke into a coughing fit, weakly turning his head to the side so he didn't cough directly into Bucky's face. Then he started choking and wheezing around the congestion in his lungs, and Bucky hastily helped him sit up, thumping him on the back until the fit was past.

Easing Steve back down and carefully tucking the blankets back around him, Bucky eyed his best friend anxiously. He looked utterly exhausted—huge bags under his eyes, his cheekbones jutting out in his pale face, his hair still damp from the snow. In this moment, while his breath wheezed in and out, he looked like he was on death's doorstep. But that thin chest still rose and fell, and that was all that mattered.

Steve cracked his eyes open again and found Bucky's. “I...I know I'm...an idiot,” he whispered. “Sorry.”

With a sigh, Bucky lay back down and pulled Steve into his arms. “Yeah. But you're my idiot. So don't you die on me too, okay?”

Out of nowhere, tears flooded his eyes. Tears of the fear that had chilled him to the bone when he'd realized Steve was missing. Tears of relief that he was okay. Tears of grief, still so potent even after all this time.

Cold, trembling fingers brushed against his cheek. He blinked the tears away to find Steve watching him with concern, his gaze intent even through the haze of fever. “I'm not going to die, Buck. Not today.”

Bucky covered Steve's hand with his, hoping to warm it up. With a sniffle, he nodded. “Keep it that way.”

#ask and you shall receive #nerdychristianfanboy #ask games #let me count the ways #captain america #bucky barnes #steve rogers #brooklybros #white tree #this took me a while to figure out because my first idea was to make this about sometime when they're kids and steve confronts a bully #but since i was homeschooled i was never really bullied and i always struggle to make that sort of thing realistic and not too dramatic #so in the end i decided to flesh out a little scenario i've always imagined

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