Bring Me Home // Bucky Barnes

Chapter XIX - Someone To Blame

Just a few days after the events on the train Steve had arrived to sit with her, as he did every morning, only to find her out of her bed and working.

"Lizzie, you need to rest," he had sighed, taking bandages from her hands and watching her quickly replace them with a clipboard from the end of a soldiers bed.

"I'm fine Steve. You can go." she focused on the clipboard in her hands as she desperately tried not to think further than two steps ahead. "I promise I'll rest when I need to."

She had lied.

The days passed by in a blurry haze. She ate when told to and slept when forced to. Her dreams, once peaceful and contented, were now places of devastation and death. His eyes would burn into her mind as she tried and tried to get to him, always too far away. His sideways smile taunted her in the darkness. His voice would whisper promises he didn't keep as she tossed and turned, pulling her from her slumber shaking and crying. Her waking moments were worse.

The pain of her wounds was nothing compared to the hole he had left behind. The part of her that laughed and danced and forgot the war around her had fallen from that train with her Bucky. As days somehow stretched into weeks and weeks became months Lizzie became numb.

Watching her try and fail to piece herself together every day only fed the excruciating pain Steve now carried with him. If he wasn't with Lizzie he was throwing himself into the search for more bases - the search for the Head of Hydra. Peggy became one of the only shreds of happiness he had left to cling to and so he found himself searching for her after every mission. She would hold him as he broke each time and coach him through the pain, which only grew with every failed search. So far The Howling Commando's had eliminated over eighty percent of the bases they knew of, and the remaining bases appeared to be abandoned according to the surveillance flights that regularly took place.

He sat alone in the small pub in the town just a few miles out of base, his face tear stained, his hands shaking. Every mission he had undertaken since the death of Bucky Barnes was a knife in his gut, a splinter in his heart. He stared into the emptiness around him as his tears fell and his mind flashed back to memories of their childhood.

*

"Steven," Sarah Rogers stood at the foot of the stairs, her uniform neat and tidy and her beautiful, long, blonde hair pinned back from her face. "Steven, James is here!"

Steve bounded down the stairs and stopped beside his mother, reaching up to give her a quick kiss on the cheek.

"We won't stay out late Mom. Promise!"

His mother ruffled his hair, ignoring his protests, and watched as he walked over to his unlikely best friend, excited to be out of the house and exploring the streets of New York with his little protector.

The two boys would walk the streets of Brooklyn for hours, talking about books and art and school. Sometimes they'd join the younger kids in a game of soccer in the street. Despite the burning in his lungs, or the ripping cough that would follow, Steve never felt like he was less than Bucky when they were together. Bucky made sure of that.

"I've gotta get home!" Bucky laughed, as Steve chased him down the little alleyway that lead to his home. "Mom's got guests and I promised I'd entertain their daughter."

"Of course you did," Steve smirked. "She pretty?"

Bucky grinned as he came to a stop, his hands on his knees as he tried to catch his breath.

"Take your inhaler punk," he chortled as Steve wheezed next to him. "And I hope so, or I've just promised my evening away for no reason."

Steve shook his head as his breathing settled. "That's a lie and you know it, jerk. You'd promise your evening away to make your Mom smile every single time, pretty girl or not. You're a softie."