Edelweiss || Bucky x Reader

Chapter Twenty Six

The smallest amount of air passes through my lips, but it's enough to wake me up.

There's air in my lungs. Cold, painful air. But I am breathing.

I am alive.

Barely.

Most of my body has been numbed by the cold. What hasn't burns like an iron is pushed up against it.

Hypothermia.

I'm not dead yet, but I will be soon enough. So what can I do...? I can't move... Hell, I don't know if I can even open my eyes.

That's kind of cruel, isn't it?

Give me the smallest amount of hope, just for it to be meaningless?

Short, shallow breaths. Not nearly what my body needs. I have no option but to lie here in the cold, feeling myself slip away.

Then I hear something in the distance that forces me to lift my eyelids, even if I can barely open them enough to see the cloud covered sky. The sharp crunch of ice snapping under boots gets steadily louder until their owner is yards from my head. More pairs of feet are on their way.

The Commandos!

My cracked lips spread into a smile. I noiselessly mouth my brother's name, throat too dry and body too tired to produce a sound.

I just need to see your face.

Let this be real.

Please.

But when unfamiliar voices shout in angry German, and rough hands drag me half dead through the snow, my smile disappears, and I realize very quickly that I would have been lucky to have died in the fall.

Day 1

I don't know what's going to happen to me.

I don't know if Bucky survived.

I don't know where we're going.

I don't know.

And that's terrifying.

My eyes close, exhaustion overtaking me. Noises blur together in my half awake state. Nothing makes sense. What sounds like someone's coughing fit could actually be and engine starting. That rattling could be a car. It could also be an avalanche. The cold beneath me could be a metal floor. Or maybe I'm still dying in the snow, hallucinating all of this.

"Trust me, you'll want those if she wakes up. She's a tricky one." Someone says from above me. He talks like he knows me, but I can't place his voice.

Another person sighs as they click handcuffs around my wrists.

I'm about to die, gentlemen. Can we cut the dramatics?

I feel the floor rising unsteadily beneath me, like two people lifting a sheet of plywood off the ground. Except instead of being stiff wood, it's a fabric stretched across two beams, supporting me like a hammock. They set me on top of something, but the fabric is still cradling my weight. A needle is inserted just below my elbow.

Ah, a stretcher.

They're trying to save me.

Or keep me alive, at the very least.

But why would they...?