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The medical freighter is a repurposed Kree imperial cruiser, supposedly stolen single-handedly by Bruce Banner; most suspect that he had help, or that he didn’t steal it at all, but honestly, if there’s anybody in space that could pull something that surprising off, Bucky would say that it’s Bruce. Since its capture, it’s been painted in bright colours and functions as one of the galaxy’s biggest neutral zones: violate the peace treaty and you’re likely to end up injured in a way that Banner isn’t going to fix. Bucky has the coordinates stuck to the wall of the cockpit, but it’s not as if it’s easy to miss the freighter.
“Don’t take too long,” Steve says as they dock. Bucky scoffs. “I’m not waiting a week for you this time. Sam and I will pull the heist without you if we have to.”
“Are you kidding me?” Sam laughs. “I’d gladly spend a week in that cantina for the music alone.”
Bucky hangs his belt by the door when he leaves; there’s a no-weapons policy in the freighter, save for the security, and he’s briefly frisked before being allowed into the matrix of corridors. Bucky knows the way round as if they were the streets of his own hometown: he’s been here plenty of times before. He walks past the posters of medical advice and continues to ignore them: flu warnings, suggested vaccinations, how to treat blaster wounds, et cetera. He walks past the lines of patients queueing up, and past them, right into the emergency ward.
Bruce is, very typically, in the middle of cauterising a wound. He looks up.
“You have the worst timing in this entire galaxy,” he says softly. “And could you not - walk into an emergency ward, please, if you don’t have an emergency ? This is a hospital. Wait in the cantina. The music’s good.”
“Hey, I need to be in the hospital right now. There’s something I want you to look at.”
Bruce sighs; though, as Bucky notes, not with too much turmoil. “Okay. I’ll page the junior, and I’ll see you when he shows up.”
Bucky leans against the wall. “You finally found a junior?”
“By accident, mostly. An exploratory vessel got caught in the middle of a firefight, and I took a bit of a shine to one of their trainees. He’s just a kid, Amadeus Cho, but I’m pretty sure he’ll have me outsmarted in a few years.” Bruce carefully puts his actual cautery down, careful not to singe his own hands. “Which means that I can retire from running this place and stop dealing with blaster-happy morons.”
“You could run heists with me.”
“I’m thinking something quiet, like paediatrics.”
Bucky grins. “That’s fair.” If he’s honest with himself, pulling political heists isn’t exactly wants to be doing anymore - Bucky is a few too many blaster wounds and broken ribs into the job now to be too fond of it - but it’s what pays, and what he gets to do with his friends. He wouldn’t give up days of cruising through space, playing card games and getting a little tipsy and laughing until his stomach hurts, not for anything.
Well, maybe for Bruce.
It’s a pretty nice cantina.
A porter removes Bruce’s patient a few minutes later, and when the curious form of Amadeus Cho arrives, Bruce takes his gloves off and heads down the corridor, ushering Bucky into a smaller examination room. Bruce is immediately calmer, running a hand through his hair and slouching a little as he sits. “Did you get the Skrull flu vaccination last time you were here?”
“Are you going to kiss me?”
“Once you’ve shown me what’s wrong with you so I know that I don’t have to kick you out into the cantina.” Bruce smiles. Bucky rolls his eyes, but complies, peeling off his shirt and offering Bruce a glance at the red and singed skin of his waist. Bruce fetches his glasses from his pocket and leans closer, careful not to touch the wound itself as he examines it.
“I got hit in a shoot-out last week, but this hasn’t healed at all. It’s still sore.”
“Yeah, they’ve been making this new type of blaster that creates more persistent wounds,” Bruce murmurs. “I don’t like them at all. I’m going to get a salve for you.” He spins round on his chair and rustles in some of the boxes of medication he has before producing a lotion. “What I’m going to do is put this on and then cover it over with a cooling plaster. Take the plaster off tomorrow and keep putting the salve on until it’s healed. If it doesn’t heal, please try not to get shot again and come back.”
Bucky hisses as Bruce applies the lotion, the pain on his side still raw, but focuses on listening to the sound of Bruce’s voice: he’s always scientific, technical, precise. At his heart he’s as willing to joke around as Bucky is, but his first priority is always the hospital, and even though Bucky would of course prefer it to be him, he likes that. Bruce’s focus is taking care of people: it’s sweet.
Hell, Bucky wouldn’t even know Bruce if it hadn’t been for his concern. He’d still been brainwashed when he’d arrived at the hospital first, the bloodied sole survivor of an attack on Hydra’s fleet, still been spitting curses in other languages; Bruce had ignored his thrashing, and the fact that Hydra is a fleet mostly hated across the galaxy, and had treated him, day after day, just long enough for him to realise that there was something odd and to call in Shuri.
And months later, with a fixed arm and a fixed mind, Bucky had left the hospital, a new man.
Bruce seals the plaster to Bucky’s skin, and sits back. “Okay. You’re done. Do you want Tony to take a look at your arm?”
“Can I get that kiss yet?”
“Once you let me take your arm.”
“You are a goddamn bartering man, Bruce.” It takes Bruce’s assistance to remove Bucky’s arm, because it wasn’t exactly attached well in the first place, and nobody feels quite ready to tackle the mess of nerves around his shoulder. Bruce is careful, though, and has done this before; once he has the metal arm in his hands, he excuses himself to pass it on to Tony Stark (resident mechanic and engineer, who Bruce has apparently known for the better part of twenty years, though often says he wishes he didn’t). Bucky considers whether or not he should just ambush Bruce when he comes back in, push him against the wall and kiss him; but then again, that might just lead to a blaster wound in the chest, so he’s not sure he wants to try it. Instead, he just puts his shirt back on and waits.
Bucky has been to a lot of places in the galaxy, but there are none he feels safer in than this hospital.
“He’s fixing it up for you,” Bruce says as he steps back into the room. “Then I ran into Steve. Were you just going to omit that you’re planning on stealing a person from Hydra in your next heist?”
“She’s a friend,” Bucky insists.
“I know I can’t stop you from doing these things and I’m not going to try, but…” Bruce sighs. “Listen. I’m a doctor. I see people coming in here from intergalactic scrapes all the time, and I worry that the next patient through the door might be you.” He pauses. “Or that you don’t even make it this far. So please be careful. I want you to actually come back.”
“You know I can’t promise I’ll be back.”
“You can promise to be careful.”
“I’ll do my best to be careful.” Bucky catches Bruce’s hand; Bruce laughs breathily and concedes, lowering himself into Bucky’s lap. He’s light, and small enough to fit easily. Bucky brushes a hand through the short sides of Bruce’s hair and kisses him, tentatively at first and then deeper as that sense of longing finally catches up with him: Bruce kisses back just as desperately, with the energy of months’ worth of waiting, his fingers tangling themselves in Bucky’s hair. Usually, he wears it at least half-up in a bun: for Bruce, he lets it down so that he can feel Bruce’s fingers running waves in it.
Considering that Bucky’s life is and has been mostly violent, the reprieve that is Bruce is something beautiful, cherishable. Bruce is soft, and slow, and has that vaguely ditzy smile; he’s peaceful, restorative, the cool breeze on a stifling summer’s day. Bucky knows he’s been through things just as horrifying as he’s been through himself - but he doesn’t press, because here in this hospital those things are the past, not to be thought of again. He just knows that he understands Bruce on a deeper level, and that simultaneously, Bruce understands him.
And, amongst all the chaos of the mercenaries and the heists and the wars and the fighting, there’s this hospital, and Bruce.
His lips are soft.
Bucky stays in the hospital for three days. “What did I say,” Steve mutters as they head for the port, but doesn’t say anything more. Bruce doesn’t see Bucky off. He says it’s bad luck. He just presses a magic 8-ball into Bucky’s hand and says, “take care of it”, and smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
Bucky makes it back: in a stretcher, sure, but he makes it back. Caught in an explosion and at one point thrown across the Hydra ship by depressurisation, he isn’t looking the best and has a black eye from when Natasha didn’t recognise him and decided to respond to intrusion by punching him, but his heart lifts the minute he sees those walls, those posters he always ignores. He never did get that Skrull flu vaccination, actually, he thinks.
He has to wait a while out in the corridor, but he’s wheeled in fairly quickly. Bruce and Amadeus have doubled-up and are both taking emergency patients, but of course, Bruce sees to Bucky, checking efficiently for broken bones and placing an ice-pack on Bucky’s eye.
“How’s the blaster wound doing?” Bruce asks softly, injecting something into Bucky’s arm that he hopes to God is a painkiller because the pain is starting to catch up with him, and he doesn’t like it much.
“Better,” Bucky says, a rattle in his voice that he’s sure he’ll have sorted by the end of the week. “After I saw you.”