Chapter Text
It was worse than the first time he was captured. Considerably worse . He turned his head to the side, spat a string of fresh blood, and watched as it slid down the wall.
“Sergeant Barnes, you would do well to answer me quickly and not test my patience.”
The bloody saliva cut a path through the grime that lived on everything in the room. He watched it intently, allowing himself to be hypnotised by it, drowning out the voice. Drowning out the pain. Drowning out the world.
“Sergeant Barnes. I will not ask again”
It had stretched too thin to reach the floor, and hung suspended in a small bead. He saw many things in that shiny ball of moisture– a thin blonde boy with a black eye and a wide smile, a dark haired girl holding his leg with tears in her eyes, a wobbly table littered with sketches drawn on scraps of paper bags and cardboard rescued from alleyways and trash cans, a muscular man flushed and ashamed.
“Very well.”
The scream that escaped him then was involuntary and unstoppable. A large ogre-looking man in a dark uniform had struck the stump of his left arm with some sort of metal rod. His vision, both that of his mind and of his eyes, simply stopped. Hot urine soaked his filthy and ragged uniform pants. His jaw shook. More blood began to drip from the saturated bandage draped where once an arm had been. Now there was only exposed bone, ropes of shredded nerves and bits of meat. He couldn’t, wouldn’t survive this. Not this time.
“J-just…do it.” His voice was as thin as the boy from his earlier memory.
“Do what, Sergeant Barnes?” A small man, also in a dark uniform, spoke as though he were reasonable. “Kill you? I’m afraid not. But I can help you, if you answer my question.”
Blood continued to patter softly on the floor. He looked at nothing. He thought about the first time he kissed Steve (Coney Island at night standing in the surf, he was drunk and terrified and excited) and decided it was the best memory to die in.
“Will you comply?” The small man asked.
His shoes were filled with sea water and sand. His mouth tasted of cheap beer and cotton candy. There was a hand in his hair and a hurricane in his heart. He was free and young and in love.
“James Buchanan Barnes…S-sergeant…3– 32557038,” the words on his tongue were mechanical, hollow, because he was no longer in the grimy room. He was clinging and whispering and pleading Stevie oh Stevie please… “James Buchanan Barnes. Sergeant. 3255–”
This time the pipe connected with his temple, and there was no longer a need to dwell on a memory.
He was free .
The first time he killed someone with the arm was when they told him Steve Rogers was dead. They had woken him several times before that, perhaps upward of a dozen, and had attempted to make him do simple tasks with an arm that was not his own. This time the drugs weren’t too bad (there were always drugs, but a few times ago a man in a white shirt and a black bow tie had spoken harshly in German as he wiped drool from Bucky’s chin, and since then he didn’t feel as doped up), and he could actually understand most of what they were asking him.
Before, they would set him at a table and ask him to lift various objects with the metal arm. A rubber ball, a key, an empty bottle, little things that were sometimes impossible to grasp. The drugs kept him stupid and easy. He’d sit there as the arm groped blindly at a piece of paper that it had no idea how to pick up. This time, however, his task appeared more complex: before him was a wire cage with a white, red-eyed rat shuffling around inside. It squeaked, almost in complaint, as it looked for food that was not there. Bucky wondered when they had last bothered to feed it. He suspected that it would never eat again.
“You will open the cage, Sergeant,” said a man standing to his right. This was the bow tie man, the one that had cleaned his face. Today he was in a long white coat, a dark blue bow tie just visible beneath the collar. “You will lift the creature. Carefully.”
The arm began to move without his consent, as though it were eager to meet the request and please the requester. It was still clumsy and smacked into the front of the cage, frightening the rat as the metal fingers scratched and fumbled at the lever holding the door closed. Once the hand had won its battle with the lever, it knocked its way into the cage, and hunted after the now terrified rodent. It squeaked in protest as it was seized, a little too tightly judging by the bulge of its eyes, and squirmed in the grip of a cold metal fist. It tried to chew the thumb, to free itself by drawing blood, but none came. Beneath the wet woollen blanket of his addled mind Bucky thought he knew exactly how the rat felt. Me too, pal.
“Very good,” the man said. The arm practically buzzed with pride at the praise. “Now, you will crush the creature.”
Bucky had killed exactly one rat in his life. It had been in their small, decent apartment in Brooklyn. Steve saw it first, and shot up onto the table as though the floor were made of hot coals. Bucky had been on their sofa, deflated and second-hand, and was nearly asleep with a book in his lap when Steve began to kick up a fuss, begging him to ‘get the guy but don’t kill em Buck, please don’t kill em’. The rat was big but quick, and Bucky had to trick it into a corner before he slammed a wooden milk crate down over top to trap it. He knelt to try and flip the rat into the crate, only to discover that he had accidentally brought it down on the rat’s neck, its head bent unnaturally to one side. It did not move. It would never move again. Steve repeated ‘don’t kill em, can’t you put him in the alley out back Buck please it’s not his fault’ and Bucky broke. He hated to lie to Steve, but he did. He put the dead rat in the milk crate, took it outside, and tossed it as far down the side alley as he could. It landed on a newspaper and looked at him accusingly. Steve said ‘don’t kill em’ but here I am, dead as a doornail. Bucky went back inside and when Steve asked if the rat was okay he told him it had run down the alley and they’d never see it again. Bucky had killed hundreds of men during his time in the army, but he would not kill this rat. He wouldn’t lie to Steve again.
“Sergeant Barnes,” the bow tie man sounded annoyed. “Crush the creature, please.”
“No,” Bucky’s voice was rusty with disuse. The drugs in his system urged him to ramble. “I– I won’t…Steve wouldn’t…it’s…it’s not his fault…”
“Steve?” The man scoffed, a small grin began to blossom on his face. It made him look mean. “Do you mean Captain America?”
“Steve…” Just having the name on his tongue felt right, felt like home. “Steve… please …”
“I see.” The grin grew into the expression of a mean-spirited child that wanted to pull yet another leg from a captured spider. “I’m afraid Steve will not rescue you this time. A dead man cannot save his friends from–”
The wire cage smashed into the side of the man’s head, and in an instant he was on the floor, pinned beneath a dangerous and wounded animal that had been a man not five seconds before. The metal hand grabbed and ripped; flesh came away like parchment and flew about in damp confetti as the hand ripped again and again, taking the nose, the hair, the lips ( dead he said dead ) and whatever it could grab. When it was too slippery for purchase, the hand began to grip and smash and squeeze and tear until there was nothing solid left.
It had taken less than a minute. Bucky began to realise he was screaming, had been the whole time, and continued to do so until three people tackled him and stabbed him with a syringe. The sedative burned as it flooded his veins. As his heart slowed and his vision faded, he watched the rat scamper over and eat the human jelly slathered on the dark blue bow tie. It had survived somehow. Bucky closed his eyes and hoped they would let the rat live.
That was the last time he was James Buchanan ‘Bucky’ Barnes. He would never fully be that man again.
After he had killed the scientist (if that was what he was) he remained heavily drugged to the point of uselessness. There were long periods where he was aware only of smells, smears of colour, shapes that moved and made garbled noises of varying intensity. He was often cold, although it did not bother him. When he was cold, he was safe. There were no shapes to make noise or jostle him around. When he could think, he would think of the thin blonde boy with the big blue eyes and the beautiful laugh. He couldn’t remember the boy’s name most of the time, but sometimes he would.
Steve. He would sing it over and over again in his head as he stood, frozen and distant. Steve. Stevie, soft when he tells me not to play with his hair while he’s drawing. Steve, angry at the twit up the block that keeps calling me a gunsel. Stevie, red faced and gasping as I unbutton his trousers. Steve, afraid to go to a Pansy Club and dance with me in case a copper shows up. Stevie, trembling in my arms, flushed and whispering “Please, Buck”. Sometimes he would forget who Buck was and get jealous. He wanted Stevie for himself.
More and more often, he would have no idea who he was, let alone the blonde boy that he saw in his head. The people that took him out of the cold never called him by a name. Sometimes they didn’t speak to him at all, and merely moved him about like meat, stabbing and cutting and injecting. Maybe, he wondered, he was meat. Would someone tell him? Tell him to quit wondering who he was, because meat was meat, meat wasn’t a ‘who’ it was a what . And whats didn’t wonder.
He stopped moving altogether not long after realising he was a what and not a who. This frustrated the others, the ones that cut, and they began to hit and shout. It did not help. So they left him in the cold and when they came back they had sticks that crackled with lightning and they struck him with the sticks and he fell and they cursed and said ‘on your feet soldier’ and ‘move soldier’ and he knew then…he was this ‘soldier’...he was a soldier. Somewhere deep within he knew that soldiers obeyed orders, so that was what he did. He rose to his feet. He moved. He obeyed without question. He was a good soldier.
The small voice that liked to remember the blonde boy protested. It said to fight, to disobey and to fight, this wasn’t who Bucky was. The small voice was right. This was not Bucky.
This was a soldier.