“Bucky! Bucky? What happened? Jim, how’s Bucky?”
“Tell ‘im it’ll be fine,” Bucky gritted out, the words
shoved out of his mouth with a pained exhale and flecks of blood.
Jim would be the first to admit that he wasn’t a very good medic—you might say that Uncle Sam
wasn’t so interested in keeping his yellow troops alive, if you were the sort
of unpatriotic SOB who said things like that—but even he could diagnose the
chance for survival when Sarge had been shot in the chest and was breathing out
blood.
“I’m not gonna lie to Cap!” Jim hissed, widening his eyes at
Sarge. Hell, even in the dark and under fire from Nazi troops, Cap’s
superpowers could probably sniff out a lie, and Barnes was already going ashen
under the full moon. There was no reason for Morita to even unpack his kit.
“How is he?” Steve demanded, his voice shrill, and Jim
busied himself pulling out rolls of gauze. “Jim!”
“Tell him,” Barnes
groaned, blood spilling into his lung and up his throat, unable to bite down
the pained moan when Jim shoved a handful of gauze and all the pressure he
could manage onto Sarge’s splintered chest. “I swear to you on your father’s
grave it’s not a lie, Fresno,” he panted, speaking more clearly than Jim
thought he should be able to, but then most of Jim’s experience as a medic had
been in the camps, carrying out the dead.
“Jim! Dammit, Bucky! Answer me!”
“My father’s not dead, you asshole.” Jim wrenched his
blanket out of his pack with his left hand, tossing it clumsily over Sarge’s
legs and doing absolutely nothing to stop Barnes’s sudden shivering, spasming
limbs. “Swear on your own damn grave.”
“’m fine, punk,” Barnes croaked, and Jim could only hear him
because his ear was a foot from Sarge’s face—even then it was faint, drowned
out by the sound of Tommy guns and the dull roar of an oncoming tank.
“Don’t lie to me, you jackass,” Steve shouted back – everything enhanced, even his ears – ducking
and weaving through trees too dense for him to throw the shield, unable to turn
and catch a glimpse of his second in command without exposing Bucky and Jim to
enemy fire. “Fresno, is he okay?”
“He won’t be if you don’t get rid of that tank,” Jim
snapped, because he wasn’t going to lie to Cap and he wasn’t going to disobey
Sarge and none of it was going to fucking matter if they all got mowed down by
Nazis before Barnes gasped out his last bloody breath.
It took Jim a second to realize that Sarge wasn’t just
flailing his limbs, and another long moment to figure out that the bastard was trying to sit up. “What the hell is
wrong with you?” he grunted, shoving down harder on the field dressing and
pinning Barnes to the ground. “You want to get shot in the head, too? One
glorious death in battle isn’t enough?”
Bucky laughed, choking on his own blood. “Bullet went
through, didn’t it?” he asked, after he’d almost caught his breath. “I can’t
tell. It all feels like I got trampled by elephants.”
“Or sat on by Cap.” Jim huffed, then gave in when Barnes
rolled his bloodshot eyes. “Yeah, Sarge, through and through. Why, you were
hoping to die with the bullet that killed you?”
It was the sympathetic look on Sarge’s face that made Jim
think it might not be sweat catching in his lashes and stinging his eyes. Jim
scrubbed at his face with his sleeve—he didn’t need to be patted on the cheek
by a man seconds from his own grave.
“I’m not dying,” Barnes lied again, his voice inexplicably
stronger, the gurgle in his throat settling to a dull rasp. “Jim, swear on
Steve’s life, I’m not. But you gotta trust me, and you gotta wrap my chest
before trees start growing through it.”
“Fertilizer’s all you’re good for,” Jim sniffed, but Sarge
would never, ever swear on Cap unless
it was true, so he hauled Barnes up and propped his useless carcass against a
tree while he cut away his shirts and folded himself around his sergeant in an
awkward embrace, Jim’s hands and arms and chest and teeth all trying to hold
two field dressings in place long enough to bind them down.
Five minutes later the sounds of the fight had shifted over
the hill, leaving Jim and his patient alone in a copse of trees on a pile of
leaves tacky with gallons of Sarge’s blood. Jim had managed to shove Sarge into
his coat and wrap him in a blanket, and he was still pale but there was already
color back in his cheeks, and his hands were warmer than Jim’s when he felt at
Sarge’s wrist for a pulse.
“Don’t take this wrong,” Jim said, chafing his hands
together and debating the wisdom of starting a fire within sight of the German
border, “but you should be dead. You make a deal with the Devil for your nine
lives?”
“Don’t tell Steve.” Sarge was starting to sound like Jackie
after he’d accidentally blown up the mess, experimenting with the meatloaf and
a fuse.
Jim tucked his hands under his thighs and sighed. “Don’t
tell Steve you’re dead. Don’t tell him you’re not dead. Make up your damn mind, Sarge.”
“You’re right,” Sarge whispered, and he really ought to have
said that ten minutes ago when Jim had shouted for him to “Duck!” “I should’ve died.” He poked at a few blood-stained leaves
with a twig, then lifted his head and stared at Jim. “That’s what you can’t
tell Steve.”
“Why not?” Morita wondered, keeping his voice low because Cap
had ears like a bat and the squad was already on their way back over the rise,
safe and well and in control of the woods if their loud mockery was any sign. “Rogers
seems like the kind of fella to believe in miracles. Sort of looks like one, if
you’re looking at him like Carter does.”
“Sure,” Bucky smirked, the gaps between his teeth still dark
with blood. “Stevie’s singing down angels and joining the holy choir.” The
smile flickered and vanished, and Bucky stabbed his twig hard into the ground. “But
I think you might be right, Fresno, about where I picked up my nine lives.”
It took Jim a moment to catch on, but no matter how many
stories Gabe told about fiddlin’ and a cloven-hoofed jig there was only one
Devil that they had all seen smiling at them through the bars, wire-rimmed glasses on a porcine face. “Damn,” he
breathed, because there was nothing else to say.
Bucky snorted, and no air whistled through the hole that
should have been in his lung. “Sure I am,” he agreed. “But there’s no reason to
tell Steve that, not ‘til I’ve used up a few more lives.”
Jim didn’t want to lie to Cap. “Guess I just worry,” he
said, when Rogers asked why Morita was still shaking if Sarge was fine. It wasn’t a lie: he worried about them all, now, because even a good medic wouldn’t know how to barter with the Devil for something good in the last life.
“Could you have survived the fall?” Jim demanded, grabbing
Captain America by his lapels and hauling himself up the man’s chest to look
him in the eye. “Could you? Could you still be alive if it had been you?”
Steve shoved him away, ran for the silence of the bar, and
went to his own fall believing that Morita had blamed him for not diving after
Barnes—but Steve had never answered, and Jim had kept his trap shut because
what was the point in reliving Sarge’s nine lives if he was dead?
(The first year Stark tried to take apart the Arctic, Jim
dragged the other Commandos back to the Alps, but neither team found anything
under snow and ice. Jim hadn’t expected a miracle—but he’d maybe hoped for a
deal, now that the SSR had flung open the doors to its lab and let the Devil in
its bed.)
Zynn's Exodus 