#v:tickingclock

James would never call himself a morning person. Sure he got up at the crack of dawn every day, but it wasn’t for lack of trying to sleep in. His internal clock just worked that way. He always got up as quietly as he could so as to not wake up Natalia, he’d start coffee brewing and go for a morning run. Steve used to come on his morning runs with him, but Steve would try and talk his ear off. James didn’t enjoy talking before coffee and at least a couple of cigarettes. 

This morning was no different, well mostly. He did have to stop at least once to catch his breath. He felt like he was doing that more and more now. James took a moment before heading up to Nat and his apartment, smoking a quick cigarette despite the fact that the doctor told him to stop. But if he was really going to die, he was at least going to die without having to deal with nicotine withdrawals. He did cut back significantly though. 

James put his cigarette out in the ashtray, said good morning to their doorman and then headed up. He leaned against the railing of the elevator, watching the screen count up the numbers on his undisrupted ride. He stepped out onto their floor and walked back to their apartment, opening the door and heading straight towards the coffee pot.

It took him a bit longer than normal to get the list together because he wasn’t going through his normal channels. Bucky could’ve easily asked Fury for it, but it was better to keep him out of it; it was better to keep everyone he knew out of this. The list wasn’t just about finding the information he needed, the list was also about tying off loose ends by whatever means necessary. These people’s accolades were covered in blood. They deserved what they had coming for them, and Bucky wasn’t going to spare them any mercy. 

Bucky had been spending the past month going down the list to find something. It wasn’t about hoping there was something to find; honestly, he wasn’t even sure if he found it, he’d really want it. He was tired. His life never gave him any time to breath anymore, and the fact that it was literally getting harder and harder for him to push himself, didn’t make it any better. He was done, but the part of him that wasn’t...he knew he had family with the Avengers, with the Invaders; that part of him wanted to find a solution; that part of him was angry that he was dying; that part of him that finally felt like he was deserving of something. But that part of him was small.

The soldier sat by himself on a train on his way to Germany. It was a nice break from his previous week in Brazil. The country side was relaxing, and he the train car he was in was empty. Bucky pulled a small notebook and pen out of his jacket pocket and opened the worn pages. He’d already crossed off a quarter of the names on the list. He knew he was going down this list a little less than quietly, but he honestly didn’t care. To the authorities in the area, these were clean kills with nothing that would raise suspicions, but to anyone in the spy world, he was making waves, big ones--even if they couldn’t pin any of these kills on him. He knew there was a very select few that could eventually figure out it was him behind it, but he was finding it harder and harder to care.

Bucky sighed, the feeling of someone watching him becoming suddenly apparent. He looked up, making eye contact with someone he wasn’t expecting.

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Busy felt like an understatement. He’d been working non-stop since his last visit to the hospital. He could tell himself that he was just trying to distract himself but was that really it? Bucky’s work wasn’t low-key. It was highly intensive, and the more hours he worked, the more he could feel how much slower he was going and how much longer it took him to recover. Things weren’t getting better, he already knew that, but he just wasn’t willing to accept that, right? Or was that what he was doing now? Accepting that he was dying and just letting himself die.

The soldier sighed as he tried to push all these thoughts and questions out of his mind. This was just another regular day where he wasn’t slowly being killed by his failing heart. He was fine. He was going to be fine, and he had just been busy recently. He repeated this to himself a couple times like it was some sort of script he was living his life by because it was. To everyone else, he was just Bucky, the Winter Soldier, part-time superhero, full-time spy. He wasn’t dying because no one knew he was, least of all Steve. 

Bucky parked his bike outside of the restaurant, sitting for a moment before his dismounted and headed inside. He was meeting Steve for lunch; a lunch he had been avoiding for a couple of weeks now, but he’d pushed it off too many times to say no anymore. Once inside, he could already see Steve sitting at their usual booth. 

He hated this. It was like arriving late to lunch with your dad after you lied to him about having left the house way earlier than you actually did, but instead of lying about something as small as that, he was lying about something much bigger. 

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Out of all the Avengers to call in for some help, he honestly never thought Jen would be one of them. Maybe that’s why he agreed to help her right away. She was probably just asking him because she knew he wouldn’t ask too many questions, which he wouldn’t—not unless he needed too. Which he was hoping would translate to her not asking him too many questions about his life currently. 

“So where are we headed again?”

Bucky needed to get out of his head. There was no point in sitting around day-in and day-out dwelling on the inevitable...at least, that’s what he kept telling himself. So he’d been keeping himself real busy. On the one hand, he was sure SHIELD was happy with the number of HYDRA agents he’d left tie-up for them, but on the other, he was sure who ever was filling out all of the paperwork really wanted him to stop. The soldier wasn’t planning on stopping anytime soon. He had at least five more HYDRA warehouses he needed to take down. That’s why he was here, on this rooftop at an ungodly hour, coffee in one hand and his binoculars in the other.

The HYDRA agents in the building across from his rooftop were hard at work. They were moving some giant robots, but now wasn’t the time to move in. He had to wait. He needed to know who the buyer was. Bucky put down his binoculars and took another sip of his coffee before looking at his watch. There was still fifteen minutes till the deal took place.

A sound made him drop his coffee and go for the pistol in his holster. He moved quickly to point it square on the person who’d dropped down on the rooftop near him.

Out of everything, this is what was going to kill him. Bucky let out a sigh as he looked at the various x-rays and MRI scans on the monitors in front of him. Even he could see the progression of what was happening to his heart, and it wasn’t like he was a trained medical professional. This was really it. After getting his arm blown off, brainwashed by the Russians, and the attempt Sin and countless others have had on his life, heart failure was what was going to kill him. It was laughable, honestly. 

Bucky turned to face the door as the doctor he’d been seeing quickly slipped into the room.

“You know, I’m going around sneaking about trying to see you without anyone else knowing—risking my job for you,” she let out a sigh, “But you copied my ID card and accessed my files—”

“Actually, they’re my medical files, and I promise, you’re the only one that noticed that I was accessing your case files while you were in a different part of the hospital. I’m not an idiot, and I’m a highly trained spy.”

He was taking a risk going to a SHIELD hospital to get checked, but this was the easiest place for him to access all of his medical information—especially the information about his dosage of the Infinity Formula. That being said, he did feel bad that he was making this SHIELD doctor sneak around when they’d only met by chance when he was forced to come to this hospital to get some stitches taken care of. But Doctor Thompson didn’t shy away from his request and had even gotten the cardiologist to help and keep everything lowkey. 

“Well, Doctor Howard is with another patient right now, but he gave me his report to relay to you.”

Bucky drew in a deep breath. Based on what he could tell, he had a feeling what he was about to be told, but that didn’t help his nerves about the whole situation. It was easy to run into a fight knowing the odds are stacked against you, at least you have some control of how things will go, but this...he had no control over this.

“The rate that your heart is deteriorating is, fortunately, not increasing, but it’s obviously not getting any better. And as you know, we don’t have the means to be able to fix what is happening...not without serious intervention.”

“Surgery? On what exactly? It’s not like you can repair what’s happening with simple surgery, right?”

“A heart transplant,” Doctor Howard slipped into the room, closing and locking the door behind him. “Sorry I’m late. We had an emergency come in, so I had to take care of that.”

“A heart transplant isn’t lowkey.”

“Any kind of surgery isn’t lowkey,” Doctor Thompson interjected. “You had to know it might eventually come to this.”

Bucky pinched the bridge of his nose as he thought this through. He didn’t have time for this. 

“I knew this was going to be a dead end.”

“It’s not a dead—”

“You need my name to put it on a transplant list. I can’t have that,” the soldier paused, “Thank you both for everything...if I change my mind, you’ll be the first to know.”

—

“Great,” he thought, the night air whipping around him as he rode his bike to his safehouse. “Back to square one.”

What was he expecting? Some other miracle result? Nick Fury didn’t have any more formula on tap to give, and any leads he tried to follow about what kind of experiments the Russians did on him were all dead ends. He was hoping someone in Department X might have some clue as to how some of their experiments on longevity went. Bucky knew from Nat they had something that worked, but it seems like they were never too keen on giving it to him—at least, he hadn’t found any evidence that they had. 

Tagged: v:tickingclock

Summary:

Bucky Barnes has spent his entire life escaping death. When Sin set out to kill him, she didn’t succeed. Nick Fury was able to save Bucky’s life with his last dosage of Infinity formula, but without any new dosages of the formula, his heart is a ticking clock. His heart is starting to deteriorate. He’s known this for awhile now, but he continues to put his life on the line everyday–every heart-stopping adventure possibly being his last. 

What will it take to make Bucky face his death and find a solution to save his life?

Notes:

This verse will take place after Kyle Higgins’ WS run and will be a mix of some comic canon as well as my own.

I've written drabble to start off this verse. Feel free to read through it.

Feel free to IM me, reply or like this post, or hit like on this starter call if you’re interested.