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“Perhaps,” says I to myself, “it has not yet been discovered that the wolves have borne away the tender lambkin from the fold. Heaven help the wolves!” says I, and I went down the mountain to breakfast. -from "The Ransom of Red Chief," by O. Henry.
Steve wakes up briefly, in a haze of pain. An unfamiliar face bends over him—a woman, hair pulled back tight against her skull, tired eyes. He smells antiseptic, the lotion that modern people always claimed was unscented, and blood, from a distance.
"Captain Rogers, the painkillers don't work on you, but the sedatives do. We're going to knock you out again."
He opens his mouth to object—this fucking hurts, but he can take it, he needs to start looking for Bucky—but they’ve already injected whatever it is into his IV, and he sinks like a pebble tossed into the ocean, buffeted by waves but always going down.
He wakes up again. It hurts. His mouth is dry and tastes foul; the pain in his abdomen twists; his first conscious act is to dry heave with unexpected nausea. He’s cold.
It takes a moment, unfamiliar grogginess like cotton between his brain and the world around him, but he realizes this is no longer a hospital bed. He’s in a cot, too low to the ground for doctors to work, and—he tries to shift, lever himself up with his hand, but there’s a metallic noise as the cuff and chain go taut. He can’t move his right arm more than six inches from the wall. There are a couple of blankets over him—one, the sturdy felted cotton that hospitals use, profoundly utilitarian. The other has brightly colored cartoon characters, with too-big eyes and strange circles for anatomy.
He has no idea what is going on. The attempt to sit up has sparked a throbbing pain in his gut, angry and impossible to ignore. It’s enough, with his swimming head and persistent nausea, to make him gag again.
“The dosage was too high,” Bucky says. His voice is flat, uninflected. Steve jerks up, the chain making a clamor and his beaten-up body echoing it. The light is low, coming around a corner. Bucky is standing behind bars, looking down at him impassively—no. Actually, if he thinks about it, it seems that Steve is the one behind bars, and Bucky is looking in.
"What—"
"The hospital doesn’t have the right meds," he says. "For your metabolism, I mean. To keep you down, they had to really overdo it."
Bucky’s eyes are calm, but it is pretty much the only part of him that looks good. His hair is in filthy tangles, a thick unruly mane. His face is fish-belly pale, and he smells like the rest of the dead fish—Steve can tell from here, he took a dunk in something foul. His body armor even looks bedraggled, and that must take some doing.
He’s the best thing Steve has ever seen.
"Bucky," he whispers, no other words in his head. It had been one thing to see him in the heat of a fight, blood pumping, and guns firing. But him standing here, making eye-contact. It’s enough to make Steve’s head swim.
Bucky’s eyebrows twitch together, but almost instantly smooth again. Steve probably wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been staring, hungry eyes flickering around Bucky’s face and body in the attempt to see every piece of him at once.
"Don’t," Bucky says. "I don't need a call-sign."
"Bucky—"
"Don’t," he repeats, firm. Steve shuts his mouth, and tries to twist further, sit up properly. He manages it, finding a position where he’s seated upright and leaning back up against the concrete wall.
"Is there someone listening?" Steve asks. He drops his voice and tries to look behind Bucky to see if there are guards.
"No," Bucky says. "Everyone here is dead. Is the wound hot?"
Steve gapes at him. It may be the aftermath of the sedatives, or the pain, or just the shock of Bucky speaking to him, but he feels at least ten steps behind.
Bucky frowns and glances at the door to the cell before turning his eyes on Steve.
"You won’t benefit by lying to me about your condition," Bucky says.
"It’s not hot," Steve says, finally. "I don't get infections."
"Good," Bucky says.
He looks at Steve for a long moment. His face is illegible to Steve, in a way it had never been before. Even in the fight, he hadn’t been quite this inscrutable. Steve had seen Bucky blank-faced and focused in battle; there had certainly been times when Bucky had raged at him, unable to articulate the depth of his emotion. This impassive control, however—that was unfamiliar.
"I missed you," he says, unable to take the silence. "I missed you so much."
Steve can see a muscle around Bucky's eye twitch. There's no other indication he understands what Steve is saying.
"Do you want painkillers that'll work?" Bucky says.
"No," Steve says, without even thinking about it. "No, I'm fine—"
"I’ll return at 0800 with breakfast," he says and takes two steps back. He doesn't stop looking at Steve, not for a long moment—but when Steve opens his mouth to speak again, he jerks his head away preemptively, with force, like it took effort to break the gaze.
He walks away. His steps are light, but he's not making too much of an effort toward stealth as he walks around the corner, where Steve doesn’t have a sightline on him anymore. Steve can hear the footsteps until they go silent—he doesn’t hear a door. He strains, trying to catch any hint of Bucky’s breathing.
He goes with an instinct, calling out, "What time is it now?"
There is a long silence. Steve may be delirious, but there's something guilty feeling about it. He feels a burst of satisfaction when his suspicions are confirmed and Bucky replies, sounding not ten feet away from the turn in the hallway.
"0438," he says. Steve doesn't hear any more footsteps or any other sign of movement.
"You can come back, if you want," Steve says. Bucky doesn't reply, but that prompts him to leave—Steve can clearly hear him take the stairs, fast enough he must be going two at a time, and the door slams when he closes it.
"Buck?" he yells, testing.
This time, there’s no reply. Steve always had to push, didn't he. He sighs and lays down, resolving to think this through, try to figure out what’s going on.
Even without the sedatives, he's asleep again in minutes.
He wakes up easier, the third time. The pain is already transmuting into itching and soreness, no longer so hot and urgent. He knows what he’s waking up to, or at least a bit of it, and when he sits up, he doesn’t jostle the chain too loudly.
The light is the same as it was when he last opened his eyes. He usually has an excellent sense of time, but it could be any amount of hours since last he was conscious.
"0902," Bucky says, without prompting.
Steve looks over at him. He's standing like he had been the first time, maybe four feet away from the bars. Too far away for Steve to reach—farther than someone unfamiliar with the capacity of a guy like Steve would bother with. He still looks terrible. His stance is firm and straight, but Steve’s been a soldier long enough to recognize the intensity of a man trying to look like he’s at full strength when he’s near to collapse.
"Hey, Buck," Steve says. He's less groggy than before—the serum has shaken off the last of the sedative, and he’s used to this level of pain.
Bucky’s eyes narrow, probably at the use of his name.
"If no one is listening, what's the harm?" Steve says, far more cheerful than he should be. He can smell something dairy, and it smells a little like food. He’s ravenous. On a tray balanced on Bucky’s metal hand, there are three large bottles, all full of a beige liquid. It doesn’t look appetizing, but Steve’s certainly eaten worse. There’s something funny about him standing there, like he’s back at Maison de Winter.
"Don’t," Bucky repeats. He’s scowling, but Steve's pretty sure not many people would have been able to place the subtle twist of his mouth as any emotion in particular.
Steve ignores him.
"You’re normally the morning person between us, Bucky. Bucky Barnes. James Buchanan Barnes, my friend," he says. "Remember when—"
One of the drinks shoots through the bars and hits the concrete wall about three feet from Steve’s head. It explodes on impact, covering him in what—licking his lips—he discerns must be a protein shake.
Steve doesn’t jump. He wasn't expecting that, but he's in the type of calm that he usually associates with combat.
"You used to work at a real fancy place, called itself Maison de Winter," he says. "That sorta shit would have got your ass thrown out, and you needed that job, you liked that job. You used to fake like you had a French accent, and it’d get you tips, once you flirted your way up out of being a busboy."
Bucky’s mouth is open, and he's panting. His shoulders are up near his ears, like he's a hackling dog cornered in an ally. Steve probably should stop, but this is something, this is Bucky, and whatever this reaction means, there’s some color starting to show up on his sheet-white cheeks.
"You were proud of how good you were at being a waiter, and you used to steal all sorts of food for me, that was the thing that eventually got you fired—god, I was so mad at you, Buck, you lied to me. You told me you were allowed to take food home, but you were as full of shit as ever, and you made me feel like a monster when you tried to pretend like you weren’t crushed you had to find a new gig," Steve says.
He’s talking like he can’t stop, like now that he has someone in front of him who was there, who could remember the taste of buttery sauce and how it was rich enough that Steve could make himself sick, eating it. He wants to throw out every detail his brain could recall, and it is more than he would have guessed—usually, his life before the serum has a strange fuzzy quality, like the normal human memories were being overwhelmed by the test-tubed perfection. But maybe he just needed Bucky, because it is all there, right at hand, and it is all he can do to prevent himself from telling Bucky about the time he caught him crying on the fire-escape, whole face in his hand like he could hold the tears in by force of will, and mouth twisted up like he was furious. That’s probably the only reason that Steve even knew Bucky was fired. Bucky had no compunctions about lying to Steve’s face, about things like that.
"I still feel bad about it," Steve says. "I do, I'm sorry. I'm really sorry."
Bucky drops the tray of the remaining protein shakes. It makes a less dramatic sound. When he flees, he’s almost noiseless, like a scared deer.
Steve watches the space where he had just been and wonders how badly he's screwing up this time.
It’s not long before he loses his dignity enough to clean up what he can of the shake with his fingers and suck them clean. It’s vanilla, maybe, but it mostly tastes like chalk.
When he wipes himself off with the blanket, he uses the ugly one.
Steve hears Bucky approach. His eyes are closed, head leaning back against the cold concrete. He doesn’t move—he’s hungry enough that his head is pounding and he is frustrated with himself, with Bucky, with the whole fucking situation. He figures that based on the little he knows, Bucky doesn’t deserve his anger, but he’s not sure he can fully contain it.
“1022,” Bucky says. His voice is quiet. It might be stretching things to call him apologetic, and maybe Steve’s gone loopy, but he thinks that Bucky sounds a little softer.
Steve grunts.
There’s no noise for a moment and then the sound of a heavy metal lock, turning. Steve’s eyes snap open in surprise, and he looks at Bucky. At the scrutiny, Bucky freezes. It takes a moment for Steve to notice the gun he’s holding, unwaveringly aimed at Steve’s head.
“Don’t move,” Bucky says. Steve doesn’t. He’s already been shot more by Bucky than he ever wanted to be.
Bucky creeps closer like Steve is a dangerous animal, and there’s risk of a bite. Steve tries to emit calm. The tray is back; three more protein shakes on it. It’s the same as it was, mostly—but a bright orange packet catches his eye. Cheetos, he’s had those. Too salty, but the sight of them makes his mouth water. Steve’s eyes jump between Bucky and the food.
It’s saying something about how hungry he is, that the promise of chalky artificial calories is enough to keep his attention even for a second, in the face of Bucky almost close enough to touch. He’s not that stupid, though—he doesn’t reach out. He stays very still as Bucky gets closer, tenser by the second. Bucky rests the tray on the ground near the cot, crouching very slowly, not shifting his eyes away from Steve.
The second it clinks contact, he backs away right back to the edge of the cell.
He doesn’t move any further, though, and the gun is still fixed on Steve’s head. Now, it is vibrating ever so slightly—it can’t be fatigue, not yet. Not from the man who had nearly killed him on that helicarrier, not even from Bucky back when Steve used to know him. Bucky’s face is empty, though, as it has been this whole time.
Steve wants to reach for the food, but he also wants to live. His stomach audibly growls, as if prompted by the chemical smell.
"You can eat," Bucky says, immediately. He lowers the weapon, knowing without Steve having to say what was stopping him. Steve doesn’t have pride about food when he’s hungry; he immediately leans over and stretches, only able to reach it with his fingertips. He hauls it close enough to grab, with a grunt, and immediately starts sucking down one of the shakes. This one tastes a little like peanut butter, which is a surprise.
"It’s about 4000 calories, all together," Bucky says. "I’ll get you more later."
Steve is pretty focused on getting sustenance. He always needs food more than un-enhanced people, but especially when he’s done this much healing. If he’d still been under medical care, they’d’ve had him on IV nutrients. His body burns calories like a wildfire when it is trying to get well.
He expects Bucky to leave again or, if not, continue to stare at him in silence. But he keeps talking, after some moments.
"I won’t keep food from you again," Bucky says. "It's wrong. You won’t have food restricted as punishment."
That’s enough to get Steve to look at him, even if he keeps the straw between his lips. Bucky’s face is expressionless.
"Thanks," Steve says, finally. "I'm sorry for upsetting you."
He’s not sure how apologetic he actually feels, but he lived long enough with Bucky to know that the expectation was that once Buck made the first move (and it was always him), Steve had to at least fake graciousness in response.
"I’ll kill you, or I’ll keep you alive," Bucky says. "I won’t starve you or hurt you more than I have to."
It isn’t the most comforting response, as far as responses go.
"Thanks," Steve says again. He's helpless to keep his voice from sounding arch, so he doesn't try. "I appreciate it, Buck."
Bucky’s eye twitches, just like before. His grip on the sidearm tightens slightly, but he doesn’t bring it back up to point at Steve.
Steve doesn’t have the good sense God gave a goose; he’s always known that, so he keeps talking.
"Have to say, your cooking's gotten worse," Steve says. "We never managed anything fancy, not like the table d’hotery that you used to work at, but you’d do your best when you had the time and the food. Always made sure I had the best of it, too, you asshole."
Bucky’s looking at him. Steve finishes the first protein shake, puts it down, and picks up the next one. He takes a couple of huge gulps and then keeps talking.
"Remember that cake you made me on my 20th birthday? We didn’t actually own an oven, so you couldn’t do it that way. But the place you worked had this weird little cake that was very popular, that was just a hundred of those little pancakes all stacked up together, with this sweet cream between each layer.
"And we had a stove and a pan, so you figured you’d make that. Thing is, though, you had no clue how to make pancakes that thin, so you just made normal flapjacks. And you didn’t know how to make the cream stiff enough to stack, so your whipped cream just seeped out the sides and made a giant mess."
Steve has to laugh, remembering the ridiculous looking thing and the sheepish smile on Bucky’s face. He’d been torn between being proud of himself for the effort, ashamed of the failure, and amusement at the absurdity of it all. The thing had been a good foot high, because it didn’t actually take that many pancakes to stack up to cake size and he had wanted to have enough layers, and the plate had been overflowing with wilted cream. It had made a little moat around the "cake," like a sad little castle.
He’s caught up enough in the memory that it takes him a moment to notice that Bucky is cocking his head as he’s looking at him, brow furrowed slightly in thought. That makes his breath catch—it’s more human of a reaction than he’s had yet.
"I loved it," Steve says, trying to put the whole universe of truth of that into his words. "I was so happy I had to hide it a little, pretend to make fun of it. I’d had prettier cakes and tastier cakes, but I never had one I loved more than that one. We didn’t have any syrup, so you just dumped the rest of the cream on it and made even more of a mess. But it was sweet and delicious, and you sang so loudly that the upstairs neighbors banged on the floor at your caterwauling."
Suddenly, the memories are enough that Steve feels his throat close up. He has to look away, blinking quickly at a nondescript patch of concrete on the far wall of the cell. He starts sucking down the shake again, hoping that some more calories will make his nerves feel less stretched thin.
He keeps his eyes there, away from Bucky, but he's no coward. He says one more thing, forces it out of himself. Bucky should know.
"They took me to a fancy restaurant after I woke up and was adjusted enough to be allowed back in New York," he says. "It wasn’t the same, but it tasted enough like your place that I couldn’t eat a bite."
There’s silence, once Steve is no longer filling it. He finishes his second shake, and before he picks up the next one, he roughly wipes his stinging eyes. He’s consumed enough liquid with enough speed that his stomach is starting to protest in a different way. He decides to wait, worried that he’d send the nausea hurtling back and already feeling stretched thin from the pointed silence from Bucky.
He finds himself straining to hear the small body noises of Bucky, without any decision to do it. His ears pick up the beat of Bucky’s heart, faint enough from this distance that it is almost imperceptible, hitting his senses with the delicacy of wind ruffling his hair. Bucky’s breathing is easier to hear, nearly drowning everything else out. It’s a little quick, a little ragged.
"Crepes," Bucky says. "Not pancakes."
Steve’s fingers clamp down on the third shake in his hand, hard enough the top pops off and it overflows, dripping wet and cold down his fingers. He looks at Bucky and Bucky looks back—he’s not calm, but he’s faking it. His eyes are wide, strained. Steve can see the whites of them. He looks terrified.
"Buck," Steve says, hoarse. "Bucky, god—"
"Stop," Bucky bites out. "Stop, stop, stop."
That’s never worked, and it isn't going to work now—
"Bucky, please," Steve says. "Do you remember? I know you do, I can tell—"
"Stop," Bucky says, louder now, almost yelling at him. "Don’t."
Steve feels half-crazed with even this hint that Bucky remembers. He leans forward, really testing the chain holding his hand back for the first time. He puts some strength into it, yanking hard—it’s gotta give, it wasn’t built for him—
Bucky scrambles to the door, and Steves hears the gun clank against the bars of the cell as he fumbles to open it back up again. He slams it shut and locks it, darting up a look at Steve like he’s afraid Steve is going to come after him. And then he’s gone, at a flat run.
Steve tries to break the chain until the skin around his wrist is abraded enough that he’s bleeding, dripping down his arm. It stains the blue utilitarian blanket and the cartoon characters, too. When he finally forces himself to stop, the last shake has warmed to the temperature of the cell.
"1500," Bucky says, crisply, unlocking the door. He has more shakes and more snack foods, a brightly colored pile. There are also a few water bottles this time, rolling around as Bucky moves and nearly crushing a bag of chips.
"A little late for lunch," Steve says. He's too exhausted not to be snide.
Bucky’s lips flatten into a line, but he doesn't respond. He’s not holding a gun on Steve this time—maybe the ineffective struggle from this morning was enough to persuade him that Steve isn’t able to get free. It convinced Steve, at least. He’s been having crazy thoughts of pulling hard enough to leave his hand behind. He’s wondered if it would grow back—they didn’t test it.
Even though he’s not armed, Bucky is still cautious when he approaches. He sets the food at the same distance as before, just barely in reach, and starts to back up again—he pauses, though, eyes fixed on Steve’s arm.
It’s not bleeding anymore, but Steve kept trying long past when he should’ve stopped, and he did a number on his wrist. It’s scabbed over, a specific irritant to give that extra special savor to his myriad other wounds. There’d been enough blood that there are splotches of stains all over his thin cotton clothing and the blankets on the cot.
"It won’t grow back," Bucky says, finally, startling Steve. Apparently, even though Steve is finding Bucky mysterious, Steve is still entirely transparent. "You won't be able to break the chain, and your hand won’t grow back."
"I can break a lot of things," Steve says, not entirely able to keep the growl out of his voice.
"So can I," Bucky says. It's mild enough that it almost loops back around into a joke.
Steve feels a shock of horror down his spine, raising gooseflesh on his arms.
"Is that how you—" he says, his voice caught in his throat. He doesn’t know how to continue, but his eyes dart to the shiny metal that has replaced Bucky’s left arm.
"No," Bucky says, glancing briefly at the ceiling. Steve wonders if that’s his new version of an eye-roll. "But it didn’t grow back when I lost it. And neither did my little toe when they cut that off to double-check."
Bucky says that so matter of factly that it takes Steve a moment to process.
"What?" Steve says, unable to stop himself. "They cut off your toe?"
"Yes," Bucky says. "The little toe has no effect on balance. The trade-off in terms of understanding the capacity of the serum was enough that it was judged worth it."
Steve bares his teeth at Bucky, suddenly furious. "Worth it? To who, Buck? What the fuck."
Bucky casts Steve a strange glance. "HYDRA. Soviet branch. That was early, and it made sense as one of the very first tests after reconditioning."
"Bucky," Steve says, the name ripped out of his throat. "God—"
"I don’t like it," Bucky says, sharper than he's been yet. The second he objects like that, his breathing sky-rockets, enough that Steve flips from rage to concern fast enough to make his own head spin.
"Of course, Bucky, of course—who would like that? Your toe—"
"No," Bucky says. "No, that was normal. I don't like you calling me that."
Steve leans back, feeling like he's been slapped. He licks his lips, mouth suddenly dry.
"That’s your name," he says. "That's always been your name."
"No," Bucky says, completely flat. "I don't have a name."
"James Buchanan Barnes," Steve says, insistent. "Your name is James Buchanan Barnes, but there were four other kids named James in our class, and you said Jimmy sounded like a little kid’s name, which was unacceptable, even though we were little kids, and you scoffed and told me that Bucky was worse, Bucky sounded like a dog, but after I gave it to you, you made everyone call you that for the rest of your whole goddamned life. Your name is Bucky Barnes."
Steve can see Bucky’s metal hand gripping the bar of the cell behind him as if he has to work to hold himself up.
"I don’t like it," he repeats, and it makes Steve think that maybe he should stop, maybe he should listen to Bucky tell him what he wants—and maybe with anyone else he would, if this was Arnie or Dernier returning from the dead, Steve would listen. But this is Bucky, his Bucky, and Steve can’t help himself.
"Why not?" Steve demands. "I don't believe you."
"I don’t know you," Bucky says. "You don't know me. Stop talking."
Steve feels a sense of recognition so intense it's like vertigo, sending him reeling. Decades ago, he’d pushed Bucky in almost precisely the same way—Bucky had kissed him while they were drunk and then spun some bullshit about it being nothing, about him being confused. He had tried to laugh it off as a joke, but Steve kept pushing. That made Bucky mean, and he sneered that Steve was short enough to pass as a girl, and at the time that had been sufficient clue that Steve was on to something, that they were on the brink of something. Bucky was never mean to him, and the shockingness of the behavior kept Steve pushing, kept him moving toward Bucky, getting into his space without touching him and asking him again and again.
"Don’t lie to me, Buck," he says. "It's me. You gotta tell me the truth, if you tell anyone."
Maybe he should remember if those were the exact same words, but he doesn’t—the watercolors of his old memories had faded into strange and abstract splotches of emotion, running together and mixing into an impossible color that no longer looked like any real thing. It is the essence of a lifetime that he had thought was gone forever, but is suddenly back.
"I’m not lying," Bucky says, more feeling in his voice than he’s shown yet. "I don’t lie and I don’t have a name and I’m keeping you prisoner until HYDRA returns because you’re my mission."
Steve leans forward again, clenching his teeth at the sharp pain the metal made digging into barely healed scabs.
"Full. Of. Shit." Each word is snapped out, staccato. "Always so full of shit, Bucky. You can spin a tale to anyone, but not to me."
"You have no fucking clue what you're talking about," he says, and that’s encouraging enough that Steve pulls harder, right through the pain—fuck it, he can lose a hand, who needs two of them anyway.
"Stop—" Bucky says, and he steps forward. He reaches out with his real hand, the metal one still grabbing at the bar behind him, as if he needs the support to remain standing or as if he needs to hold himself back from going entirely to Steve. "Don’t hurt yourself."
"Why do you care, Buck? Why would a stranger care about his prisoner, huh?"
Buck’s lips are so tightly pressed together that they’re going white, matching the sickly pallor of his face. Maybe he’s stressed, or maybe he’s holding in vomit, but he doesn’t look like he’s capable of opening his mouth. He sways a little toward Steve, but he doesn’t move any closer.
Steve purposefully jerks his hand in the cuff hard enough to make himself hiss, and Bucky flinches all over.
"What do you remember?" Steve says, intent. "How did you forget?"
Bucky meets his gaze. He looks younger than he had when they had fought that war together. His eyes are almost devoid of color, monochrome grey. There’s a long moment where they look at each other, and Steve tries to infuse every ounce of his love into the air between them, tries to will things back to normal, or at least an acceptable level of strange. It’s not acceptable that Bucky doesn’t remember him. It won’t ever be.
The moment stretches, and Steve feels like what he had thought jumping out of a plane would feel like, that moment before his first leap to rescue Bucky. He had imagined his stomach lurching up like it did on the roller-coasters on Coney Island. He had thought it would be like falling—but it was like flying, it was weightless. The adrenaline in his blood had wiped his mind clean, and he had thought about nothing, plummeting to the ground. He had felt powerful, maybe for the first time in his life
Now, though, all the terror of falling is in his body, and he’s plunging fast and hard toward something he doesn’t understand.
Bucky closes his eyes, squeezing them tight enough that Steve can see the wrinkles emanating out, and flees again. By how much noise he makes as he unlocks the door, he doesn’t open his eyes again until he’s long gone
Steve could scream in frustration. He wants to throw things; he wants to cry. The door of the cell is ajar, Bucky too panicked when he left to close and lock it, but it’s useless. He doesn’t honestly want to tear his own hand off to get free, and it is clear that these chains were built for a supersoldier.
Bucky, probably. These chains were probably built for Bucky.
He tries to hold it back for as long as he can, but he has to hit the ground sometime. He cries, ugly and hard.
"2216," Bucky says.
Steve is lying flat on his back on the cot. This time, he doesn’t look up. The ceiling is the same dull color as the rest of the cell. It’s warm, for a grey. Maybe it’s how yellow the light is.
"Why do you keep telling me the time?" he asks. He feels scoured clean and empty. There’s no more emotion left in him to bubble over, and he doesn’t remember a single story to throw at Bucky. He’s left blank, and he asks Bucky only because he has an idle curiosity.
Bucky doesn’t respond for a good thirty seconds.
"It’s hard to be down here," he says. "I always wanted to know."
Steve closes his eyes and lets that pass through him. He opens them again, just too long to be a blink.
There’s silence. He wonders if Bucky's waiting for him to respond, but he’s not sure he has anything to say. He hopes that Bucky brought more Snickers. Those are his favorite modern candies.
The sound of the cell locking surprises him enough that he looks up at Bucky—he’s outside the cell, but he’s closed the door.
Bucky meets his eyes for just a breath, and then his gaze slides away, down.
"Sit up. Get ready to catch," he says, in a monotone.
Steve follows instructions, curious despite himself. There’s another little pile of snack foods, right at the edge of the cell, just inside the bars. There’s another shake, more water, and what looks like a frozen meal. He sniffs the air: tomato sauce.
"Ready?" Bucky asks, with almost no rising inflection.
Steve doesn’t say anything, but he dips his head in a nod.
Bucky tosses him a small object, underhand and slow enough that Steve easily catches it out of the air. The metal bites into his hand as he clenches his fist on it. He knows it is a key before he opens to check.
"I want you to stop hurting yourself," Bucky says. "You have three healing GSWs, a concussion, and an orbital fracture."
"The concussion is definitely gone," Steve says, studying the key in his hand. "Those disappear real quick for me."
"Well, you have a hell of a shiner still, so humor me."
Steve stops breathing. When his breath stutters back, and he looks up, there’s no trace of personality in Bucky’s expression. Bucky meets his gaze easily, and there’s almost something challenging in how flat his affect is.
He’s so caught up in whatever that statement was, whatever this key means, that he barely registers when Bucky slips away sedately.
Steve unlocks himself and twists his wrist around, testing it. Judging by how much that hurts, he probably broke some of those little bones in his efforts.
Nonetheless, he smiles.
"Big mistake, Bucky," he says to empty air. "I'm the definition of someone you don’t want to give an inch to."
It’s a good feeling to stand up and stretch his legs. He’s weak, weaker than he’s been in a while, but he can stand. More than most could say, a couple of days after getting shot.
Movement makes him realize that he has other bodily needs, and he figures that’s what the squat little toilet on the other side of the cell is for. He’s never seen anything like it—it’s built like a tank, and when he makes a half-assed effort to pull it up, his strength can’t budge it. The bolts holding it down are the size of half-dollar coins.
After that business, he gathers up the food that Bucky left him and eats, remaining standing for the sheer pleasure of it. It’s fantastic to eat a hot meal, even if it is mostly lukewarm and weirdly mushy for spaghetti. He makes a note: Lean Cuisine is gross, but it’ll do in a pinch.
Then, he rips off a scrap of the ugly blanket and uses it to clean himself with one of the bottles of water. There’s only so much that can help, but he’s filthy, and there are patches of dried blood flaking off all down his arm.
He considers searching the cell, but the insanity of the day catches up with him. Not a half-hour after getting off the cot, he lies back down and goes to sleep.
The next day has a strange sort of rhythm. When Steve wakes up, Bucky informs him that it is 0458. He was already standing outside the cell, five feet away, and he’s pointing a gun again. He has Steve flatten his back against the far side, delivers Steve food, and disappears again.
Steve sleeps, even though he'd typically be starting his day around then.
When he wakes up, it’s 1044, and Bucky is watching him. This time, Steve isn’t quite so well-behaved, but Bucky leaves the second Steve says his name for the first time.
Steve searches the cell, methodically. Every inch of it is concrete or metal nearly as thick as his thigh. This was well-designed to keep someone like him in, and Steve doesn’t see a clear way to leave. Even the cot is bolted down so intensely that Steve can’t shift it, and it’s too low to get underneath, should he even want to do that.
He hopes, vaguely, that people are looking for him—but when he thinks of Natasha, the evident fear that she had when thinking of Bucky, he changes his mind. Natasha would likely shoot on sight, and Steve thought, with an optimism that even he knew was a little stupid, that they were getting somewhere here.
The next time Bucky visits (1402), he tells Steve that the key won’t work as a file for the bars. Steve hadn’t even thought of that.
"That’s pretty creative, Buck," Steve says. Bucky flinches less this time, but he still doesn’t look happy about it. "Lotta practice getting locked up in here?"
Bucky shoots him a baleful look but doesn't take him up on the question.
"Say," Steve says, as guileless as he could manage. "How’d you find yourself here?"
Bucky doesn’t respond for a long moment. Steve considers it a small victory that he’s looking down as he carefully piles the food on Steve’s side of the cell. The gun is still entirely stable at Steve’s head, though, so there’s no winning everything.
He leans back against the wall harder, using the opportunity to stretch his back out a little bit.
"Did you rob a convenience store?" Steve asks. He's needling, now. He’s pretty good at that. The instincts developed when he was a little shit with something to prove and had to learn the weapons of the weak hadn’t left him when he gained a hundred pounds of muscle.
"Vending machine," Bucky says, shortly.
That brings Steve up short. "HYDRA has vending machines?"
"Yes."
Bucky stands up and backs his customary six feet away from the bars.
"The break room is nice," Bucky says. He shrugs, a strange-looking gesture since he only uses his flesh shoulder. "Comfortable couch."
"No fair," Steve says. "The cot is terrible."
"You get used to it," Bucky says. He sounds drained. Steve’s eyes narrow as he studies him. He still looks like shit. He’s still in his body armor and tac pants, his hair is getting increasingly tangled every time Steve sees him, and his color hasn’t improved any. Right now, he’s trembling slightly. It’s almost invisible, and it hadn’t affected how well he aimed the gun, but now that the weapon is at his side, Steve can see subtle shivers run down his limbs.
"Maybe it isn’t so great," Steve says. "You look like shit."
Bucky shrugs again.
"Remember how sick I used to get? I'd be dead on my feet and insisting I was fine. You would have to drag me to bed and threaten to sit on me, but once I was lying down, you never needed to—I usually couldn’t get up again, not for love or money," Steve says. He’s hoping to get some sort of reaction, some more sign of life. His heart pounds preemptively, unable to forget how intense yesterday had been.
Today, though, Bucky just shakes his head and leaves immediately. Steve doesn’t know if that’s a no or a yes about the memory, and he worries on the question, chewing it in the side of his mouth like a dog with a bone.
Bucky will probably be back at 2200 or so again. He's been keeping a steady six-hour schedule during the day, and he promised that Steve wouldn’t be starved. Steve just has to get through the time in between.
His mind flips over the problem, gnawing on it. He doesn’t know how far from DC he is. He doesn’t know how Bucky is alive, other than the demonstrable fact that he got the serum at some point, survived a thousand-foot drop onto rocks, and has been in HYDRA hands. He doesn’t understand how Bucky has forgotten him, and even now, he doesn’t quite believe that he has entirely. There’s too much here, too much familiarity in how Bucky is trying to take care of him, and too much anger as a response to Steve pushing.
They will have been calm for about 24 hours when Bucky gets back. Steve’s feeling better—still weak enough that his restlessness is more mental than the unsettling energy of his over-tuned body needing action, but better nonetheless. He’s going to push it again, he decides, when Bucky comes to give him more food and water.
He considers which memory to throw in his face, which tactic. Maybe he should bring up the kiss out loud, or the time days later when Bucky finally succumbed and made the first move for a second time, furious with Steve and looking for a way to shut him up. His lips had done wonders, even if it was a lousy sort of lesson to teach a guy like Steve.
The thought of that time made his fingers twitch and a thin flame lick underneath his skin, like a lighter, just kissing a needle to sterilize it. Apparently, he is feeling better, if his body reacts like that just to a slightly racy memory.
He drums his fingers on his leg and shifts on the cot and stands up and walks around in circles, feeling like a lion at the zoo. His stomach still aches with too much movement, but it is something at least, and he’s never taken well to boredom.
At around 2140, Steve feels a little like he's going to vibrate fast enough to take flight. He forces himself to sit down on the cot and wait, flattening his hands on his thighs. That lasts for about five minutes, and he’s up on his feet again, walking around for want of anything better to do.
2200 comes and goes. There's no sign of Bucky. Trust him to be late.
2230 and Steve thinks that really, it is a miracle that Bucky has been so steady this whole time. His ma used to say that Bucky’d be late to his own funeral, and Steve thinks, with a sharp pain in his heart unlike anything he’s felt since the serum, he guesses that ended up being true. About seventy years late, by the looks of it.
By 2300 Steve is sitting right at the edge of the cell, ears straining for any sign of Bucky. He presses his ear between the bars, leaning in despite the cold metal and the way it makes his still healing cheekbone twinge unpleasantly.
0000, no Bucky. Steve is scared, though he knows it is irrational. Bucky is imprisoning him, and Bucky is strong enough to nearly kill Captain America. If there were a fight, he’d have heard it—that’s almost certainly true, guns aren’t quiet, and the concrete couldn’t be that thick. What if Natasha came and found Bucky, what if she shot him dead, and nobody knows he’s down here? The thought twists in Steve’s gut, and he wonders if he’d deserve starving to death here for falling Bucky so severely. Bucky had starved here, sometimes. He knows it, just by the way that Bucky promised not to do it to Steve.
0100 or so, and there’s a noise from the top of the stairs. All of Steve’s muscles tighten, getting ready for something—he doesn’t know what. But then there’s a scraping sound, someone stumbling—and an unpleasant, gritty drag of metal against concrete. Bucky. It has to be Bucky, and he’s not doing good.
Steve’s suspicions are confirmed soon after.
When Bucky gets to the bottom of the stairs, he's barely standing. He’s holding the same gun he’s been using this whole time, and when he sees Steve on his feet, face pressed between the bars, he gestures vaguely at him with it. He’s swaying, and Steve can smell new sweat overlaid on old from here. He has some color, now, but it is an unhealthy flush of fever.
"Bucky," Steve says, urgently. "Bucky, what's wrong?"
He doesn’t mean to hit Bucky's buttons, not now, but he can’t help it—he reaches out between the bars, hand outstretched. He wants to do something, but he’s powerless.
"Away from the bars," Bucky says.
"Bucky, Jesus. Have I once tried to attack you? I barely hurt you when you were trying to kill me."
"Dislocated my fucking shoulder," Bucky mumbles.
"Three gunshot wounds," Steve snaps back. "What's wrong? You lost a toe, tough guy; you can’t be this gone over a shoulder."
Bucky shakes his head, and the movement makes his wobble more dramatic. He loses balance and takes a quick step to regain it, clearly having to work to keep his legs underneath himself. Steve's stomach lurches sympathetically.
"What’s wrong?" he repeats. "Sweetheart, please."
Bucky’s eyes flick up to Steve's face. They're glassy, over-bright, but his eyebrows go up a little.
"That one’s new," he says.
"Not new," Steve says. "Not at all. You used to call me all sorts of names, and I hated them, always told you to stop—but you’d smile and kiss me and call me honey anyway. Eventually, I figured out it was because you liked the idea of it for yourself, and when I started, I couldn’t stop either—you always looked so delighted when I’d be sweet on you."
Steve is speaking too fast, desperate. He's still pressing himself against the bars of the cell like if he just had enough will power he could phase right through.
Bucky smiles a little, and Steve's heart clenches like his arrhythmia’s back.
"Please," Steve says. He wants to ask to be let out, he wants to be able to go to Bucky’s side—but he doesn’t want to scare him away. Bucky steps closer, the bag of food in the hand not holding the gun making plastic rustling noises with how hard he’s trembling.
"Please, sweetheart," he says. Bucky closes the distance, falling to his knees in front of the cell. He’s almost close enough to touch, and Steve reaches out, helplessly, but his hands hover a few inches above Bucky’s body.
Bucky shoves the plastic bag into them like that's what Steve wants. Steve drops it immediately.
"Sorry dinner was late," Bucky says. "I promised. Sorry."
"No," Steve says, and that was enough to make him touch Bucky, gentle for the first time since his death. His skin is clammy, warm underneath a cooling layer of sweat. "You can get sick? What’s wrong?"
Bucky leans into it, slumping further until he's leaning against the bars. Steve wants to hold him, wants to touch him all over, but he settles for gently brushing his hair out of his eyes. It was sticking to his skin.
"Withdrawal," Bucky says, finally. "I think. I kinda remember going off, um—sometime. And this happened. They caught me."
"Withdrawal from what?" Steve asks, and Bucky glances at him, a quick flash of blue eyes. He almost seems amused.
"Didn’t ask too many questions," he says.
"That doesn’t sound like you," Steve says, trying to sound comforting. "You were the worst XO imaginable."
Bucky’s lips twitch, another maybe-smile, and he closes his eyes. He’s shivering in quick bursts, shaking hard enough that there are faint clatters of his metal arm against metal bars. Steve strokes his hair and feels helpless for longer than he’d admit to.
"How can I help you?" he whispers. It's not a real question, or at least, if it is, it isn’t intended for Bucky. He hasn’t prayed since the 40s, and it feels somewhat dishonest to start now, but he’d be lying if he denies beginning to run through ave Maria in his head.
"Could take the drugs," Bucky says. "Know where some of them are. Sometimes they’d give me field doses to take myself."
Steve freezes. He doesn’t—
"Don’t want that, though," Bucky says. It's soft. Steve doesn’t fully understand why it is such a secret, but he can tell Bucky feels it that way.
"We won’t do that," Steve reassures him, and Bucky gives him a sweet little smile. Steve feels like he’s starting to run a fever too, with all those smiles.
This exchange kicks him into action enough rip a piece off of the bottom of his pants and gently wet it. He uses it to wipe off Bucky’s face, as best he can, running the rag smoothly over his skin. There’s nothing worse than marinating in your own sweat when you’re sick like this. Steve remembers.
Steve tries to give Bucky what comfort he can and hates the fact he can’t tear apart steel bars with an eight-inch diameter with his bare hands.
"Midazolam," Bucky says, out of nowhere. He pronounces the word clearly, hitting every consonant.
"What?"
He takes a deep breath and continues, not opening his eyes. "Midazolam between missions. Zuclopenthixol, clonazepam, and cyproterone acetate."
Bucky’s eyes open to thin slits, peering up at Steve. There’s something sly in his expression.
"Don’t ask questions," he says. "But they think I can’t hear for some reason."
He seems pleased with himself, and Steve tries not to let his fury show. He doesn’t know what those are—he’s no doctor, he only just finished high school—but that was a lot of big, scary-sounding names. And if Bucky’s constitution is anything like Steve’s, the doses would have to be incredibly high.
"People always thinking you're dumb, Buck. Why'd you think that is?" Steve says. The teasing tone feels foreign in his mouth, but it’s what he would have said way back.
"Too pretty," Bucky mumbles.
"That’s right," Steve says. "Who said you were allowed?"
Bucky smiles a little, pushing his face against the bars like he wants Steve to go back to wiping him off. Steve obliges, unable to do anything else.
That’s a long night. Steve doesn't even try to sleep, doesn’t move from where Bucky is slumped over against the bars. He has circulation better than any other human alive, but even his ass falls asleep sometime in the small hours of the morning. He eats some of the food that Bucky brought because his body demands it, but even the intensity of modern flavorings is unable to make to taste like anything more than sawdust.
Bucky sweats and shivers, but at least he sleeps.
Mostly, Steve stares. He stops touching him once he's deep asleep enough that he’s snoring very slightly. He doesn’t want to wake him, not when he so clearly needs it. But he can’t look away. He traces every line of him and wonders when that familiar face got strange. Is it his memory going, or does Bucky look different now? How’d they even end up here?
At one point in the night, Bucky thrashes away with enough violence that he slams head against the bars. He freezes instantly at the contact, breathing hard, wild-eyed. Steve is making soothing noises, his own heart pounding at the sudden movement.
Bucky stares at him, nostrils flaring, face blank.
"Is it something I said?" Steve says. Bucky keeps staring, but something softens in his eyes. He looks incredulous.
"I’m hilarious," Steve informs him. Bucky doesn't respond. Words seem beyond him at the moment. But he leans back down against the bars, and Steve ever so gently strokes the top of his head. Bucky allows it and closes his eyes, falling asleep again.
Steve watches him.
Steve wakes up. His muscles immediately object to spending the night on the concrete floor, pushed as hard as he can against steel bars. His first thought is not about the pain, though—he’s cursing himself for falling asleep, for failing at the simple task of keeping a vigil.
He’s scrambling before he's all the way conscious, trying to get up. But when he opens his eyes, Bucky is there. He’s awake, sitting cross-legged on the other side of the bars. He’s looking at Steve, face serious. It isn’t empty, though, not like it has been. Steve can see consideration behind his eyes.
"We were lovers," Bucky says. He doesn't sound unsure.
"Yes," Steve says.
That’s a question he’s got handled, even though he deflected it when Sam asked. He’s pretty sure he didn’t do a great job then, judging by the look Sam gave him.
Bucky looks better. Steve studies him, looking for traces of the sickness and doesn’t find any. Thank god for the serum, Steve thinks, or whatever equivalent they gave Bucky. Even one night was more than Steve wants to deal with right now.
"I’m not the right asset for honeypot missions," Bucky says.
Steve has to take a moment to interpret that and then clenches his fists, digging his nails hard into his own palms. The little pricks are helpful.
"You were pretty good at finding sugar when it wasn't for a mission," Steve says.
Bucky cocks his head.
"That why I remember people who weren't you?" he asks.
"Well," Steve says. "There was before me, of course. But also—"
He doesn’t have a way to say this that doesn't reveal the truth of them, but Bucky, more than anyone, probably deserves to know.
"We both liked you coming back to me," Steve says. "You’d go off and cat around, and then I’d sweat other people’s perfume and cologne right off of you."
Figures that Bucky would want to talk about their sex life first thing. That’s in character, once they got their shit together.
Bucky hums. He keeps looking at Steve. Sometimes he'd get like this, especially during the war. He’d just consider Steve and think inscrutable thoughts. Steve would sometimes ask him what he was looking at, but Bucky wouldn’t ever answer. It always made Steve itch, though. Steve always wanted to know. If someone had asked him what superpower he wanted, he might have asked to read one mind in particular. He’s never felt that urge more fiercely than right now.
"To come back to you," Bucky says, slowly, after a long time thinking. "I had to leave, first?"
Steve bites the inside of his cheek, hard enough he tastes blood mixing with his spit.
"You didn’t have to go so far," Steve says. He wants to take the words back, the instant he says them. It’s just not fair, to even imply for a second that Bucky left him on purpose, to put this in continuity with their games—but Bucky rolls his eyes and the corner of his lips quirk. It’s not a smile, not entirely, but it takes Steve’s breath away.
Steve is still reeling from that when Bucky pulls himself to his feet.
"You should have stolen the keys," Bucky says, once he’s upright and looking down on Steve. "You’re a terrible prisoner."
"Normally, people say that because I'm terrible at being kept, not because I’m terrible at escaping," Steve says.
"You can be terrible in a buncha different ways," Bucky says. He’s standing lightly on the balls of his feet, and he rocks, obviously considering.
"What?" Steve says. This has all been more expressive than most of what he’s said so far. His face is nowhere near the quicksilver grins of the Bucky he remembers, but he isn’t deadened as he’d been.
"If I give you the key, will you wait ten minutes for me to get a head start?" Bucky says, finally. "I’m not ready to come all the way back, not yet."
Steve is leaning back on his hands, and he feels his face go still himself, surprised.
"Then why let me go?"
Bucky shrugs.
After a moment, he drops what must be the keys to the cell at Steve’s feet. He hesitates before turning, searching Steve’s face. There’s the distinct sense that he’s memorizing Steve, committing the details in a way that Steve hopes he wouldn’t forget this time.
When he turns, Steve acts without thinking about it—that’s not atypical.
The keys hit Bucky right in the back of his head.
He turns quick enough that he catches them, which is a neat trick.
"You’re late with breakfast," Steve says serenely. "I can’t feed myself, and you promised."
Bucky is blank-faced for long enough that Steve thinks he fucked up somehow, but then his smile stretches, sweet and genuine.
He nods and goes to leave too soon. Steve wanted to keep looking at that smile for eternity.
"Find me a vegetable!" Steve calls out. "And take a shower, you stink. It’s cruel and unusual for you to make your prisoner smell you."
Bucky gives him no acknowledgment.
Breakfast is standard—snack food and protein shakes—but when Bucky comes back six hours after that with lunch, he brings a plate stacked comically high with pancakes, a can of whipped cream, and six bell-peppers in a plastic bag.
He’s in someone else’s civvies—which Steve can tell because they don’t quite fit across his shoulders—but his hair is pulled back in a tail that any modern Brooklyn hipster would be proud of and he finally doesn’t reek of putrid water and old sweat.
"We’re going to have to work on your sense of what makes a meal," Steve says, but he’s smiling like a fool.
"They’re microwavable," Bucky says. "The breakroom doesn’t have either an oven or a stove."
Steve eats, and Bucky stays to watch him. Steve's seated on the bed, and Bucky stands six feet away from the bars, impassive.
The pancakes have a strange chemical aftertaste, but they’re still the best things he’s eaten since the forties.
"Thanks," he says, once the giant stack has been reduced to crumbs and he’s licking whipped cream off of his fingers. Bucky gave him a fork, but as was tradition, the volume of topping got everywhere.
Steve gets up and sets the dishes at the edge of the cell, goes back to the bed.
"I want a cheeseburger," Steve says, as Bucky picks them up. "And you need to send exactly the email I’m going to dictate to you, so bring some sort of electronics when you come back."
"I’m going to beg you to go," Bucky says. "You really are terrible."
Bucky doesn’t, though. He follows instructions. When he comes back, he has a comically large bag full of blankets and pillows with him.
Steve is obscurely disappointed none of them have the same cartoon characters his favorite blanket does, but he figures that just gives him something to request tomorrow.
fin.