hollow

He found himself calling out, “Nurse,” as soon as he saw her start opening her eyes. They would want to check on her, maybe do a more comprehensive exam now that she was finally conscious. “Clara,” he breathed. Seeing her with her eyes open, he felt a giant wave of relief. He buried his face in his hands. He was feeling relieved – happy – worried – scared. Ethan couldn’t recall ever feeling this way. Not for himself, not for anyone. Clara wasn’t just anyone. She was more than he could have ever asked for.

“Oh my god, Clara,” his voice was muffled by his hands. This was good. They weren’t out of the woods yet, but she was awake. She knew who he was. That was more than he could have asked for. Ethan looked towards her with bloodshot eyes. “How are you feeling?” It seemed a loaded question. She was probably hurting. She was probably in pain. But she was alive, and that was all he cared about.

“I feel...sore,” she mumbled, voice and mind bleary from all the painkillers that were in her system. Though she wished she could think straight, she knew being in agony wouldn’t have made it any easier. Feeling foggy was an acceptable alternative to feeling the way she had when she was still in the car, surrounded by twisted metal and trying to make peace with her death. “And kinda...” She made a vague grumbling noise, attempting to refer to her drugged up state.

She took a slow breath, feeling relieved that breathing felt easier now. “Are you okay? Are you...alright?” As she asked, the arm without the broken shoulder reached out towards him and she gently pressed her fingers against the side of his face.

A gurney came out from behind the double doors and Ethan stood up as soon as he recognized one of the nurses alongside the bed. He walked towards them so that he could walk beside Clara as they took her to the room she would be staying in. He had decided that he wasn’t going to leave her side if he could help it. Looking down at her was painful. She looked so small lying on the gurney. Bruises littered her body, and he winced when he saw the plaster casts. He placed one hand on top of hers lightly.

Before he entered the room, he took out his phone. ‘clara + me. car accident. at hospital now will call you soon. don’t bother calling me before then’. He typed out the message quickly before sending it to Lucy. If he had Tyler’s number, he would have told him too, but he didn’t and he figured one Bennett wanting him dead was all he needed. He turned his phone off as soon as he confirmed that the message sent. Ethan supposed that Clara would have wanted him to tell her family, even if he did do it hours after the incident.

There was a chair next to the bed, and Ethan quickly decided that was where he was going to stay until she woke up. The beeping and lights from the machines were irritating, but he was thankful for the fact that they let him know that she was still alive. “Clara, I am so, so sorry.” The words were whispered. He knew the doctors were in the room, but he wanted to maintain some semblance of privacy. His words were for her and for her alone.

Slowly, she managed to open her eyes, wincing at the sting of bright hospital lights. A heart monitor beeped away beside her, steady and reassuringly even. There were other noises too and the feeling of being terribly restricted by something. It took her a couple seconds to realize that it was the bandages and casts that covered the majority of the damage she had sustained. God, she could only imagine what she looked like.

Her thoughts immediately went to Ethan, to where he was, what he was feeling and how he was doing. He had seemed okay the last time she saw him sitting beside her in the ambulance, but she knew he would have walked on two broken legs just to make sure she was taken care of first, so she worried that things hadn’t been what they seemed. Her eyes searched the room, head tipping to the side carefully.

Brown eyes found him beside her, not in another hospital bed. He was okay. He was safe. It seemed pretty clear that she had taken the brunt of the impact, a fact that she was grateful for if it meant that it had kept him from being hurt any worse. Given the chance to redo it a thousand times, she would pick the same choice to be sitting where she was.

“Ethan...” She croaked out, voice rough from sleep and dull pain. Still, despite it all, she couldn’t help but give him a smile. It was a smile out of joy from seeing him alive, but also a reassurance to him that she, herself, was alright and alive. It was somewhat marred by the gash across her face and the bandage that covered it, but the intent and her usual sweetness was still there.

Once they got to the hospital, the doctors there took her away from him. They said words like ‘surgery’ and ‘repair’, but all he understood was that they were taking Clara away from him. Once she was out of sight, he felt deflated. He had no will to do anything, or argue against them trying to help him. They stitched up his forehead where he had hit the steering wheel, and had him evaluated for any further head wounds. With no fractures or bleeds, their only concerns were a concussion. Perhaps as docile as he had ever been, he let them evaluate him as they saw fit. Other than a few scrapes and bruises, he was fine. He got off easy.

So many people wanted to talk to him. He only wanted to talk to Clara. But she was off god knows where with so many injuries. The first person to talk to him was a representative from the hospital. They asked him his name and her name, who they should contact. About the insurance. He gave them his insurance information, but he didn’t know about her. Instead he told the hospital to bill him for any treatment they have to her. The next person was a police officer. They took his statement, and told him that no one was jumping to any conclusions.  No one was in trouble yet. The officer just told him they would be in touch.

The hospital staff had instructed him to wait in the waiting room, telling him that someone would be out to get him when she was out of surgery. He didn’t listen. He had sat down in the hall that lead towards the operating room – while he would move if a gurney was moving down the hall, he was dead set on ignoring anyone else who told him to move. Besides the surgeons working on her, he would be the first person to see Clara. He had to be.

She had sustained fairly bad damage from the impact, but the worst had been the shrapnel that came from both cars. Her body with littered with cuts of varying degrees of severity. One that ran deep from her eye down across her jawbone was lucky not to have sliced her jugular. The worst one was from a piece of metal that had embedded itself nearly three inches into her side, requiring parts of her muscles to be put back together. Still, it was incredibly lucky that it hadn’t pierced any of her internal organs.

Other than that, her shoulder, hip, collar bone and three ribs had broken from the impact and she had torn a muscle in her neck. The fact that she was alive and not paralyzed was a miracle, even if she would be recovering for a long time. If the other car had been going even five miles faster, it was almost guaranteed that she wouldn’t have made it. 

After they put her back together as well as they could, leaving her covered in bandages and casts but clean from blood, they went to move her to a room where she could rest. Still unconscious, she was wheeled out of the room and down the hall, pausing only a moment so one of the nurses could begin explaining things to the man that had waited so long for her and instruct him to follow her to a room so Clara could be hooked up to all the monitors and IVs while they waited for her to wake up.

He was able to get out of the car, but online because it wasn’t his side of the car was damaged. It was the passenger’s side that got damaged, and he just had to get to Clara. That was the sole thought in his mind. Clara, Clara, Clara. Ethan managed to stand up, though it took more that a few seconds to regain his balance. His vision had blurred out for a moment, going black, and he leaned on the car as he tried to circle around to her.

Managing to open her door, a surge of panic went through him. He wanted to reach out to her, make sure she was breathing, but he didn’t want to touch her. She looked like a porcelain doll, only one that was bruised and battered. “People are coming, people are coming, I promise.” It was becoming a mantra. There were people who were going to come help. He had called and they had said they were sending out help. He had to believe that it would be soon. The sirens pulled his focus away from her.

“We’re over here.” He leaned on the car, waving his free arm in the air. His voice was hoarse and he kept yelling that, over and over, until the ambulance finally stopped. Was this was relief felt like? From the first ambulance, an EMT came over to his car, and from the second, one went to the car that had hit his. 

“Sir, can you tell me where you’re hurt?” Ethan stared blankly before shaking his head, pointing towards Clara.

“Help her first. You need to help her.”

The EMT reached out a hand towards him, ready to make an excuse about how there was blood on Ethan, that he was clearly hurt. Ethan was expecting that.

“I don’t give a fuck about me right now. Help her now.”

He moved aside so that the man could begin to work on Clara. He watched them put a cervical collar on her, as well as stabilize her airway. He felt utterly helpless. It took two more men to get her on the bodyboard so that they could move her into the ambulance. 

As they wheeled the gurney, he followed behind her. “Sir, I’m afraid you can’t go with her.”

“Like hell I can’t.” Ethan had never been one to take no for an answer and, though every step he took sent aches through his body, he climbed up into the ambulance. He was daring them to tell him to get out.

He was speaking, she knew that much despite the way his words sounded distorted, like he was speaking from a thousand miles away. She could hear him move and she watched as he got out of the car to come around to her side. If she was going to die, at least he was there. At least she wouldn’t be alone. She thought of Lucy and Tyler and another silent sob wracked her body, causing another flash of pain.

Then there were lights, bright and flashing and definitely on an ambulance. Things were moving, people were talking and rushing all around before they made their way to her. It was like things were happening too fast and too slow all at once and it took her several minutes before she realized it was because she was slipping in and out of consciousness. One moment she was in the car, searching for Ethan’s face as the EMTs moved around her, the next she was in a moving ambulance, speeding down the road. Their expressions made her more afraid for her life, but she found her boyfriend and chose to focus on him instead. 

Keep fighting, she told herself. Keep breathing despite the pain. Don’t leave him alone. She knew if she died, he would blame himself. Even without knowing how the crash happened, she knew that he would internalize it and she couldn’t bear the idea of that. She refused to allow him to suffer like that.

Then things were dark again.

When she opened her eyes again, she was being wheeled somewhere in a hospital and all she could see was the ceiling and the doctors above her. Some of the pain had faded, so she suspected they gave her some kind of painkillers. Either that or she was losing sensation as she died, but she couldn’t let herself think like that. As she was brought into a room, there were words like surgery and then a mask. When things went dark that time, it didn’t hurt so much.

He blew the stop sign. He didn’t have the right of way, and another car had already been there waiting when he reached the intersection. His heart caught in his chest the moment he saw the car through the window to his right. He slammed forward, his seatbelt locking, and his head slammed against the airbag before he sat back upright. Everything seemed to have become loud all at once. It was a mixture of ungodful noises, screeching and scraping – he recognized the sound of glass breaking. It was an instinct but his foot reached towards the brake pedal. The car had already stopped.

Ethan’s head hurt. His body hurt. His face. His mouth. His arms and legs. What happened. What had happened. He reached up, blinking as his fingers came back stained with red. Something was bleeding – was he bleeding? His mouth tasted like iron, and he spit, blood spraying in front of him. Maybe he had bitten his tongue. Where had he been going? He looked around, dazed and confused, when his gaze fell on Clara. His blood ran cold.

Then he saw the other car. This was wrong. This was all wrong. They were supposed to be having fun, enjoying their day. But god there was blood. His blood, her blood. He could see the other car through the window. He only thought briefly about how the other driver was. “Clara.” He reached a shaky arm out towards her, touching her on the shoulder gently. “Clara, please, say something to me.”

There was a beep from next to him. His phone was still on. It seemed ironic to him that a little piece of metal, glass, and plastic was not damaged at all. Who had texted him? He smelt something burning. They needed to get out. They needed help. Help. He grabbed his phone with unsteady fingers, tapping out the numbers: 9-1-1. Someone answered, but it seemed like it had taken an eternity to get to that point. “I think- I think something happened maybe? A-an accident. People are hurt. We’re hurt.” He looked out the window, to get some indication of where they were. “We– we’re near the pier? Two stop signs before, I think. Please. Just we need help. She needs help.”

His voice had turned to a shout.

“Get here fast.”

Then everything went black.

When she came to, she felt nothing at all. It might have been shock or something else entirely, but she just felt numb. There were sounds, metal clattering to the ground and a voice that wasn’t clear from somewhere beside her. Something smelled off, but before she could identify it, the rest of her senses became sharp and clear and the agony set in. It was more pain that she had ever felt in her life and she would have screamed if she could get in more than a half breath with the way the twisted metal pressed against her chest. 

There was wetness on her face, on her hands, on everywhere she could feel. Something in her told her that it was blood, but she didn’t want to think about it. She had to get out. She had to move. She had to do something to relieve the pain. Trying to move only made it worse and a barely audible gasp of pain escaped her as her efforts revealed a piece of metal jammed into her side, trying to tear her apart with every breath.

“Ethan...” That was her next thought once the pain allowed her to think -- or perhaps once she realized there was nothing she could do to ease it. Was he okay? Was he safe? “Ethan,” she called out again, turning her head to the side with rough groan of agony. He was there. She could see he was there and breathing and moving. There was blood on him, but she didn’t know how much was his and how much was hers. She didn’t want to know.

“Are you...Are...” Words were nearly impossible through the pain and she coughed roughly, the action sending agony through her whole body. Please, let him be okay.

“But you’ll talk to me, won’t you?” He paused, waiting expectantly, but then he kept talking. “You can’t just get trapped inside of your own head. That won’t do anyone any good, especially not you.” Steve couldn’t imagine what would happen if he brought Bucky back with him just to watch him shut down into himself. It wouldn’t be fair.

“I’ll...try. Hydra didn’t like it when I talked, but I guess that’s just another thing I’ll have to get used to.” The statement was said casually, but written across his face was all the pain that had been inflicted on him anytime he dared to say anything beyond ready to comply.

“That’s the thing. I am me. You didn’t kill me. I am still here.” It sounded defensive. It sounded like a weak argument. But it was true. The fact that Steve was Captain America had allowed him to take hit after brutal hit. It allowed him to be thrown around, and nearly drown. While he was hurt, he healed. That was what mattered.

His eyebrows raised at the mention of Bucky knowing Nat. It did make sense, now that he thought back on her reaction. “She doesn’t really talk about her past.” He supposed that if he were her, he wouldn’t talk about it either. Instead, he was a national hero, and his history was on the walls of museums and pasted on page after page on the internet. “Even if he can’t fix it, maybe he can ease some of the pain. Would you want that?”

The fact that the man in front of him was alive had nothing to do with his enhancements, nothing to do with the fact that he was some hero in skintight red, white and blue. It was the fact that the sound of his voice had sent the Winter Soldier’s heart trembling against his rib cage. It was the fact that one phrase had broken through seventy years of torture and brainwashing to reveal a scared, hurting James Barnes. 

“I don’t want anyone else in my head.” That was the bottom line. No matter what their intentions were, Bucky didn’t think he could stand someone else rewiring his synapses. If he could break his programming, then he would. If not...

The smile dropped. He knew that. Natasha had told him and he had seen the file that had some of the information on the Winter Soldier. Most of it had been about where he had spent the seventy years, as well as who he had killed. “Yeah, I guess they don’t. But you know what? I’m still alive. That’s saying something.”

“The same could be said for Natasha Romanoff – that she deserves to be incarcerated. I’d bet many people thought she didn’t deserve a second chance either, but she is still walking around without any tails on her.” He took a deep breath, exhaling sharply. “We can have Stark try and help you, figure out what exactly it was he did. I’m sure he’ll never let me hear the end of this if he ever found out, but he really is brilliant.”

Bucky shook his head, a low sigh echoing from him. “If you were anyone else, you wouldn’t be alive. I would have...” He frowned, thinking back to how rattled he had been as they fell out of the helicarrier and he made the choice to pull Steve out of the water. “You were an exception.” Not one that Hydra was pleased about, he imagined, but he hadn’t stuck around to find out.

So it was Natasha nowadays. He wondered how honest she was with them, if she had really adjusted to being one of the “good guys” or if she’d always be just like him, always on the verge of running. “I trained her, you know? Back when she was still working for the Red Room. I was killing fifty years before she was even born.” At the mention of Tony Stark, his breath caught in his throat despite his attempt to remain calm. “I know what they did to me, Steve. I...I remember all of it. I don’t think even a Stark could fix it.”

“Buck, you were–” he paused –”you are my best friend.” He thought of their most recent fights, with Bucky being controlled as the Winter Soldier. The highway where Nat got shot, on the helicarrier where for a second Steve swore he was going to die. “It’s gonna take more than just seventy years to change that.”

His tongue ran nervously across dry, cracked lips as he considered Steve’s words. “I am a criminal, Steve. I killed more people than you can imagine.” In the time it took for him to suck in an unsteady breath, a thousand faces flashed through his mind, bloody and accusing. “Not bad people. I killed innocents, civilians and people that just got in my way. I nearly killed Nat more than once. I nearly killed you. People don’t like people that try to kill Avengers.”

“To talk?” It was a simple answer, but it was the only one that Steve thought would work. He didn’t want to say he wanted Bucky to be safe, or say anything that might upset him more than he already was. “Is that alright?”

He just wanted Bucky to give him a chance. Wilson had said that Bucky wasn’t the kind to save, but to stop. Steve wasn’t going to allow that no happen, no matter how many people told him otherwise. Maybe some people would give up on him, or want him to be put down. That wasn’t going to happen so long as Steve had a say. 

Lips pressed into a thin line, it was several long moments before he spoke again. “I’m a wanted criminal. If you let me walk away, you’ll be aiding a criminal. If I go with you...” His voice trailed off and there was a sharp intact of breath as he thought about what SHIELD -- or the remnants of Hydra -- might do to him if they had a chance. “I don’t think we can just talk.”

Steve supposed Bucky was right in having some trepidation about SHIELD, and any of their allies. There were too many people with associations with HYDRA – the people who turned Bucky’s life into hell – and those with worries about the world But to have worries about Steve? The thought made him sick.

“No, he is not. Nick Fury killed him.” Good thing, too. While Steve had little faith in what was left of SHIELD and where their priorities lay, with Nick Fury at the helm, it was in good hands. “I reckon that’s all for the better now – what do you think about that?”

Would he still have joined up if he knew what would happen? Or would he have stayed home with Steve, convinced the scrawny blond to stay home too and grow old the way people should? If Bucky was honest with himself -- something he was slowly learning how to do -- he didn’t know. The world needed Captain America, but he needed Steve Rogers and he couldn’t ever make a choice between the two.

“I’m...glad he’s dead,” Bucky admitted, though some part of him shot through with pain at the idea of his handler dying. He hated that part of himself, the part still full of torture and brainwashing. “There’s always more Hydra, but at least he’s gone.” Cut off one head and two more grow back.