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Fuck. Bucky breathes out slowly, shakily, tamping everything down. The holding cell is small and damp, the concrete walls sweating. It’s an inner room probably used for isolation rather than processing — no barred windows, gated door, far from any exit points — and he’s got it all to himself. Either there was no one else in the slammer or they didn’t trust the former Winter Soldier to be integrated with the general population. At the same time, they also expected a pair of standard handcuffs — wrists fastened in front to boot — to be able to restrain him. Bucky flexes both fists slowly, careful not to exert pressure on the chain. He could snap it apart as easy as anything, but I don’t do that anymore.
There is arguing in the hallway and, for a second, Fauxamerica’s coiled, barely-restrained righteousness reminds him of Steve.
He remembers. He never fucking forgets, no matter how many times they’ve ordered wipe him and threw him into the chair, volts of electricity coursing through his head, scrambling his brain like the proverbial egg. He shudders, breathes shallowly. He’s not going to let himself go there. Not when he’s clawed his way out and back to some semblance of sanity. Not after Steve had so doggedly refused to give up on him.
Steve.
He makes himself think of Steve. Steve is dead and buried at Arlington, even though he’d wanted to be laid beside his mama in Brooklyn or at least interred alongside Peggy, who he secretly married back in the fifties when he’d time-skipped returning the Stones after Thanos. Instead, the U.S. Government intervened, and he was given a place of honor at the National Cemetery. Bucky wonders if he’ll be given the same accolade — or at the very least earn a three-by-eight parcel in some small tucked-away corner the way Dugan, Jones, and Morita did. Somehow he doubts he’ll be treated like the rest of the Howlies when — if — he finally kicks the bucket, despite the exhibit at the Air and Space museum hailing him as a national hero, despite the pardon Steve had secured for him before old age caught up with him and the serum could no longer keep it at bay. The same pardon that he'd just fucked up by missing the therapy session. It doesn't sit right — that they'd nail him for such a minor procedural and not for, say, actually leaving the country.
The shouting gets closer and he presses the heels of gloved hands into his eyes, elbows propped on knees. His head hurts.
Would they give Isaiah the 21-gun salute? Would they bury him in the heart of Arlington alongside Steve?
The stump anchoring his metal arm sparks with sharp, hot pain. His side aches dully from breaking his fall down the side of the tractor trailer. That’s the part hardly anyone realizes about having enhanced healing. He heals faster, but it doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel the full spectrum of the process. He wants a hot shower and his apartment, where the thermostat is never lower than seventy-five. But that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen anytime soon.
He remembers 1951 and Goyang. The surprise and shock that there was another who could match him, who could shear a titanium arm off at the elbow with bare hands. It’d taken Tony Stark and an arc reactor to do it the next time around. It’d hurt, of course, but not as much as what had come afterwards — after he'd retreated and Hydra fetched him from behind enemy lines, took him back to Siberia, where they repaired his arm and reset him to factory settings before shoving him into a freezer. It was the sixties the next time he was thawed.
He can still hear Isaiah in his head… “I’m not gonna talk about it anymore. You know what they did to me for being a hero? They put my ass in jail for thirty years. People running tests, taking my blood, coming into my cell. Even your people weren't done with me.”
I’m sorry, he’d wanted to say. I know what they did to you. They did it to me. They used me too. They created a legion of people like us from my genetic code, and when they couldn’t be controlled, they were executed. And now there’s more of us and I don’t know how because Hydra’s gone. But he hadn't because he'd learned a long time ago that apologies don't make a whit of difference and amends can’t even begin to cover it. He wasn't Hydra anymore (I’m not a killer), but it still stings.
He knows that if he gets out of here, if he’s released instead of being transferred to the SuperMax out in Colorado, Sam is going to have a fuckton of questions, none of which he will answer because he isn't going to speak for Isaiah.
It’s a relief, a little, that Sam knows Isaiah exists. That maybe Isaiah wouldn’t be totally forgotten. That James Buchanan Barnes isn’t the only Super Soldier left out there. But Isaiah had earned his quiet retirement — not peace, there is never peace for men like them — a hundred times over, and Bucky will be damned before anyone drags Isaiah into it. It’s bad enough that he’s entangled in this mess alongside Sam, but maybe Isaiah was right about him... a tiger can’t change its stripes. He can imagine Steve telling him that Isaiah is wrong.
But...
“You think you can wake up one day and decide who you wanna be? It doesn’t work like that. Well, maybe it does for folks like you.”
Isaiah was talking about him being white.
Jesus fucking Christ. Eighty years and this shit was still going on. He’d thought that between the ensuing decades and Wakanda opening their borders, something would’ve changed. Sometimes he hates being a hundred and six.
Gabe used to bitch back in the forties that, despite a degree from Howard University and knowing several languages, he was still called “boy” — and worse — even by the brass and would’ve been a cook if it hadn’t been for Steve handpicking him for the Howlies. And the way the cops today immediately assumed that Sam’d been the antagonist instead of the other way around… They were damned lucky that the cops found the warrant out for his arrest before things could go even more sideways and Sam ended up on the front page of national news as yet another statistic. At least this way….
He knocks the back of his skull against the cinder block wall several times. Bounces the balls of his toes, leg pistoning up and down. Shit, he needs to get out of here.
He could escape; it’d be easier than easy. But it wouldn’t earn him any favors. He forces himself to calm, to summon a little of the Soldier’s compliance.
The air conditioner switches on with a gurgling roar and an icy blast. He startles. Shit. He flexes his fists, thankful for the stiff gloves, ever mindful of the delicate chain connecting his wrist. He can’t appear as a threat. He lets his head hang low, and for a minute he misses his long hair and the concealment it offered. The temperature in the cell drops uncomfortably. He wants to move from the direct line of the air, but he doesn’t dare make the situation worse for himself — this is the closest to being handled he’s been in a long time — and hunches up in his jacket. He doesn’t do cold. Not anymore.
He loses a bit of time; next thing he knows, there’s a guard at the gate, impatiently rapping at the bars. Warily, he stands, walks over. The door opens and the guard motions for him to step through, hold up his hands. There's another guard in the hallway.
Keeping his eyes on Bucky’s, the guard brings a key to the cuffs, and pops them open. He jerks his chin for Bucky to follow them down the hall.
The cuffs drop from Bucky’s wrists and he understands.
He’s being let go.