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as he signed in at the visitor desk of Mount Sinai Hospital, is the thread that keeps Bucky fighting his cancer. When that breaks, my last link to life before the freeze will be gone. Except for Gail. But she wouldn't ever be able to get close to him. All they shared anymore was the knowledge that they'd both gone on without ever quite getting apart. When Bucky dies, Steve thought, I'll go to the funeral, and I'll see her there, and then maybe we'll talk a few more times, but she will be a widow in her seventies and I'll be a super-soldier figurehead for SHIELD, and he knew how that would go. Someone would call him when she died.
    Snap out of it, he told himself. Quit wallowing.
    The door to Bucky's room was open, which meant he was probably awake. Knowing he was a friend of Captain America's, the nursing staff—all of whom had kids who were Captain America fans—took outrageously good care of him. They did everything but cure his cancer.
    Steve tapped on the door. "Hey, Buck," he said.
    No answer.
    Two steps into the room, Steve was certain Bucky was dead. He lay on his back, mouth open, tubes and needles everywhere... but the monitor next to the bed ticked off a steady heartbeat. Steve took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and settled in the chair next to Bucky's bed. He wondered where Gail was. Usually when Bucky had to go into the hospital, she spent most of her time there with him.
    "Ah, Buck," he said softly. He didn't want to wake Bucky but he couldn't stop himself from talking. He had to talk, even if it was just to hear himself thinking things through.
    "I need you on your game, pal," he said. 'You want tactics and strategy, bad guys taken out and objectives accomplished, I'm the guy. But what do you do, Buck?
    What do you do when you might be walking past the bad guy on the street, and there's a way to find out but they won't let you use it?"
    Bucky snorted and shifted a little in the bed. Steve waited to see if he would wake up, but then Bucky's breathing settled back to normal. He hasn't got much left, Steve thought, listening to the shallow, wheezing breath of his oldest friend, and his eyes started to sting.
    "They're not with us, Buck," he said. "Everyone wants shades of gray, but that's what it boils down to. We're fighting the bad guys, and they're not with us."
    The monitor chirped, and Steve heard a whir and click as one of Bucky's machines dispensed meds. For a while Steve couldn't think of what else to say. Then it came to him.
    "All enemies foreign and domestic, right?" he said.
    "Right," came a voice from the doorway behind him.
    He turned, and there was Gail. "All enemies," she said again. "Foreign and domestic. You do what you know is right, Steve."
    "Yeah," Steve said. He looked down. "But the thing that I know is right... it's against the law. It's wrong." She stepped over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. "We have to trust someone to know when to make that decision. We have to trust you, Steve."
    His cell phone rang. Gail whacked him half-seriously on the shoulder, where her hand had just been resting. "You get out of this ward with your phone. They're not supposed to be on in here." Steve muted the phone without looking at the call. A passing nurse stuck her head in the door and said,
    "Turn your phone off in here."
    "Already did, miss," Steve said. "Sorry."
    "No you didn't", she said. "I can still see the display. Either turn it off or you're going to have to leave the ward."
    "Okay, I'm turning it off." He flipped the phone open and as he was hitting the power button, he saw that the call had come from Admiral Esteban Garza, one of the top members on the Joint Chiefs. He stood up. "I have to take this one, Gail."
    "Go," she said, and he was struck by how strong and dignified she was in her old age. Would she have become the same if he'd never hitched a ride on that rocket?
    Wrong question, he thought. All the questions he came up with were wrong.
    "Take the call," Gail said, shooing him