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Some days it's easy to forget when their former shadowy government organization was, indeed, a government organization. For Skye, anyway – her stint as a super-powered guerrilla spy has now lasted longer than her time as an official agent of SHIELD. May and Bobbi and Coulson, they must have more trouble adjusting. Point is, Skye's visits to the large underground detainment facility in Washington? Definitely one of the times when she has no trouble remembering that SHIELD used to be an official big player in the international intelligence business.
On the outside, the whole thing looks like any other military-style office building. Underneath, it unfolds into a behemoth with detainment cells, interrogation room, labs, and, well yeah, offices. Most of it is empty now, of course, but Coulson blew new life into it when he sent Skye on her ongoing mission to investigate and assess other powered people. She doesn't make use of it much, but even with the best of intentions, sometimes there is no other way.
Today, Skye isn't here to drop someone off, though. She's here to... well, in all honesty, she's here because she's curious.
Their newest detainee isn't just anyone. The man currently being guffawed at by several agents who have even less reason to be here right now than Skye does is no one other than Bucky Barnes. Or, as he’s better known: the Winter Soldier. Rumor has is no one's quite clear on that yet, least of all Barnes himself. His being here is a compromise; it's either that or a state prison, and from what Skye heard, Rogers roared against that something fierce. He roared against the upcoming trial too, but the Attorney General refused to budge on that one. Either way, until a verdict has been reached on whether Barnes is a tortured and imprisoned hero or a murderous terrorist, he'll stay here.
She pushes past the cluster of people gathering around the two-way-mirror, tries not to think about how many of them make way because they know she belongs here, and how many do because they know what she is. Upon glancing at the man in the cell, she feels her heart contract. Just like everyone else, she grew up learning about Captain America in the war, how he freed Barnes's entire battalion, about the Howling Commandos. She remembers the old photos, if dimly, and the hunched figure on the other side of the mirror bears some semblance to them, but mostly he just looks worn. His hands are folded in his lap, secured with heavy-looking, special cuffs befitting a super solider. His hair is long and unruly, the plain white t-shirt they dressed him in allows her to get a good look at the infamous metal arm. His eyes are fixed to the table in front of him, but the way he holds himself signals clearly that he's aware he's being watched.
Skye braces her arms on her hips, turns around, and stares the other agents down one by one, channeling her inner Melinda May. “Exactly how many of you are supposed to be here? How about we give him some privacy? This isn't a damn circus.”
From the way the crowd dissolves, some of them muttering under their breaths, others looking caught, it was a fairly decent impression. She nods to herself once everyone but two of the permanent guards that do work here have left and pulls the curtains before the mirror closed. They have cameras in there. It's not necessary to watch him like this, too.
Then she follows her own command and leaves.
***
The next time Skye is at the facility in official capacity, she doesn't have quite that much self-restraint. She does her job, delivers her homicidal science experiment of the week, and strolls towards the guards on duty when it comes to monitoring Barnes. She stands behind their desks, arms akimbo, trying to look like she belongs here. Which she does. Sort of. Neither of the guards bats an eye at her presences, so as far as fake it 'til you make it goes, she's not doing too badly.
“What's he been doing?” she asks, and the guards shrug simultaneously.
“Not much. He mainly just sits there all day and stares at nothing,” says one of them.
“Honestly, he's kinda creepy,” supplies the other.
Barnes's cell is one of those intentioned for long-term use – a table, a bed, a sink and a toilet behind a divider, some shelves for clothes and books – but it's still a prison cell. There's not much else he could do. And yet... “Did someone, I don't know, talk to him?”
The guards turn in unison, and honestly, Skye thinks, these two must be spending way too much time with each other. “You mean... in there? Uh. No.”
Skye spent mere days in solitary of a kind, in a nice little cabin and with people she knew and loved checking in periodically, and she'd almost gone stir-crazy. People are staying away from him for much similar reasons as they did put her into quarantine back then: because they fear he's dangerous, because they don't know what to do with him, because they think him a monster. No one deserves that.
“I'm going in,” she announces, not waiting for a reaction.
Her ID card should grant her universal access to every cell in this facility; if that doesn't include Barnes's cell, things will get real embarrassing fast. But she doesn’t have to worry. The lock turns green and the door clicks when she swipes it, and then there she is, standing there with no idea what to say.
She sits down opposite from him and smiles. “Hi. I'm Skye.”
Barnes looks up, but doesn't say anything. He just stares at her, face completely blank, and she's struck by how young he looks. Technically, he's been around for almost a century, but physically, he's not much older than her. She wonders how much of the time that passed since he was a twenty-something soldier he remembers, how old he feels.
Eventually, he huffs out a breath. “If this is an interrogation, you might want to ask me a question.”
“It's not,” Skye says. “I'm just... are they treating you okay? I work for what used to be SHIELD, and it's my job to make sure people who are different, people who have powers, are treated fairly and like human beings.”
That's not quite the truth, but it's close enough to roll right off her tongue.
He doesn't seem to know what to do with that, inclines his head, squints at her. “I'm not hurt? If that's what you're asking. No one hurt me.”
She barely manages to suppress a frustrated groan. “I mean, is there anything you need? Anything I can do to make your time in here more bearable, please tell me.”
Barnes keeps staring at her, and she's not sure if he gets what she's trying to offer, how far they got with deprogramming him, whether he's even able to recognize his own needs beyond hunger, thirst and getting tired. But then he leans back a little, raising his non-metal arm.
“I want – “ he indicates his face, his chin “ – I want that gone. They don't let me have razors. They won't come near me. I look too much like him.”
Skye's torn. The decision to stay out of range of that arm at all times is one she understands and considers a smart one. But to look into the mirror and see the weapon someone made him, rather than the man he tries to figure out how to be again, must be unbearable. She takes in a breath. “Okay. I'll bring one next time.”
***
The guard on overnight duty stares at her with wide eyes, looks at her like he can't decide if she's brave or harboring a death wish. “You want to go in there. To him. With a razor.”
“Yes.” She stares him down. “I'm not asking, I'm letting you know.”
With that, she leaves him standing and scans her ID card to access Barnes's cell. He looks up when she enters, face expressionless, and she holds up the shaving cream, the plastic packaging with the disposable razor, and a towel she’s snatched from a stash down the hall. As soon as she's close enough, he reaches out, but she shakes her head.
“No,” she says. “I'll do it. I'm not handing you a sharp weapon.”
The look he gives her makes it clear he thinks that, if he wanted to get his hands on the razor, he'd find a way. She doesn't bother pointing out he'd be in for a surprise. After a short staring match, he shrugs. “Fine.”
Skye glances around the cell for the best way to do this, and realizes belatedly that she should've brought an extra chair. Both of the chairs from the interrogation table are bolted to the ground, and so is the table in between. Reaching across it could work, but the angle would be all wrong. Which leaves...
“Get on the bed,” she says.
Barnes cocks his head at her, and she sighs.
“Sit on the edge, facing to the side. I'll sit next to you.”
Apparently that's enough explanation, because he stands and does as she instructed, and she follows to sit down too. She takes the razor out of its packaging, shakes the shaving cream and disperses a generous amount into her palm. He flinches away when she first touches his face but he catches himself, stills, staring straight ahead as she spreads it on his face.
“I usually only do this on, like, my legs,” she says, more to her benefit that his; babbling calms her down. It's not that she's nervous per se, or afraid, but tension rolls off him in waves and it's contagious. “If I nick you, I apologize in advance. Won't be on purpose.”
He doesn't reply, but he inhales, squares his shoulders, then hunches down a little so they're the same height, and Skye goes to work. The angle still isn't ideal and she's never done this before, and it's awkward. Barnes still won't look at her directly. She's acutely aware she's touching someone who doesn't want to be touched, even though he asked her to help him. Once or twice, she does nick him, droplets of blood trickling into the foam and delivering a stark contrast to the white, but he doesn't react at all, almost as if he doesn't feel it. Skye wonders whether the serum made him indifferent to insignificant, minor amounts of pain – it'd beat the alternative, which is that the treatment he received from Hydra elevated his pain threshold to the point where the brief burn of a razor nicking skin doesn't register anymore.
The thought is too much to contemplate right now, and Skye shakes her head to get rid of it. Barnes raises an eyebrow, eyes flickering to her face, then away again.
“Sorry. It's nothing,” she says. “Unwelcome thoughts.”
From there on in, she makes a point of concentrating on the task at hand and not letting her mind wander. After she's done, she stands, pocketing the razor, and he reaches for the towel and rises to his feet as well. She watches as he walks up to the large mirror, turns his face this way and that. Without the rough stubble he looks even younger, and it's more than she can stand.
She turns to leave, and his normal, human hand shoots out to loosely grab her wrist as she passes. Power surges through her veins, but she forces it down.
“Thank you,” Barnes murmurs, glancing up at her, meeting her eyes. He lets go.
Skye smiles. “Don't mention it.”
***
For the most part, Skye’s job isn’t putting people like herself into cells. She has to do that more often than she’d like, but four times out of five, the powered people she meets are just like her; something happened to them and their lives changed, dealing with that made a few waves, but they’re not villains.
She has a good streak, for a week or two. No visits to Washington. Usually, she’d be glad.
***
It’s way past midnight when she pulls up to the detainment facility again, her team right behind her with a kid who came into mind control powers due to another artifact left behind after the Chintauri attack. She leaves them to check him in themselves, pours them each a cup of coffee and waits.
At first, Skye doesn’t even register the young, female agent who has appeared in the door to the kitchen – it’s been a long couple of days and she’s tired – not until she knocks on the metal door frame and clears her throat.
“We have a problem,” she says, voice thin and nervous. No, not nervous; she’s scared. “With Barnes.”
The problem must be serious. Skye doesn’t stop to wonder when she became the person to talk to about reigning in wayward brainwashed super soldiers; she’d much rather it’d be her than a trigger happy guard with a tranquilizer gun or worse.
“What’s your name?”
“Agent Tedesco.” After a beat, she adds, “Selena.”
“Okay, Selena. Tell me what happened.”
She marches past the other agent and heads towards Barnes’s cell while Selena fills her in about a seemingly random outburst roundabout an hour after they turned the lights off in his cell. There’s a commotion audible from a few corridors away, men talking over each other, shouting, also obviously scared. Skye stamps down on her very own survival instinct and turns around to address the other agent.
“Stay here, okay? You’re my last resort. If anything goes wrong, you put him to sleep, you understand?”
Selena nods, hand wandering to the gun in her holster, and Skye continues on. Taking a deep breath and standing tall, she enters the guard’s room. The lights are on, and through the two-way-mirror she sees Barnes, standing in the middle of the room with his hands balled into fists, breathing heavily and glaring daggers at the mirror. He’s managed to tear the chairs out of their anchoring and has thrown them across the room, bits of cement strewn around them.
“Status?” Skye demands.
The same guard who was on duty when she was here last, with the razor, looks at her like he’s leading a lost battle and she’s the reinforcements sent in at the last minute. “He seems to have calmed down a little, but... Someone needs to get in there. There’s debris. He could hurt himself if he loses it again.”
She doesn’t hesitate; she leaves her gun and the knife from her boot on the guard’s desks, gets out her ID card, and steps into the room. Barnes whips around immediately, eyes going wide when he sees her.
Hands by her side, palms open, she takes another step. “Remember me?”
He nods, tension lining his shoulders, but the metal arm shifts and his hands uncurl.
“Okay. So you know I won’t hurt you, right?” Another nod, and Skye moves to sit on the bed, like they did when she shaved him, in an attempt to look even more nonthreatening. “What’s wrong?”
Barnes doesn’t follow. He watches her every move with narrowed eyes. “I slept. Then I woke up, and everything was wrong. I didn’t know where I was. Or when I was. I...” He looks down to his feet. “I freaked, is the word, I think.”
Actually, Skye thinks the word he’s looking for is panic attack, but it probably wouldn’t help to point that out. “But you remember now? Where you are?”
“Yes,” he simply says.
“Okay. Do you mind if I sit here? We could talk for a little while.” She indicates the space next to her. “You can sit, too, if you want.”
He shakes his head. “You can talk, but I’d rather stay here.”
From the way his gaze flicks to her, the expression on his face that almost looks like embarrassment, she suspects that’s not being hostile. He doesn’t trust his own reactions, thinks he might hurt her if she gets too close. Then again, maybe she’s projecting; that’s what she’d worry about if she were in his shoes, anyway. Skye decides to do what she does best, next to hacking: rambling off the top of her head.
“When SHIELD fell, two years ago, I had only just become an agent. Through the backdoor, you might say. One day I was handed a badge. The very next day, the organization that issued it didn’t exist anymore and we were on the run. We fled to an underground bunker, a little bit like this one, but not a prison per se. Someone who I thought was my friend, or maybe more, betrayed us and kidnapped me. Almost killed two other friends.” She looks up, finds Barnes watching her intently, head cocked to the side, and so she continues. “After I was back at that bunker, with my team, I couldn’t sleep right for weeks. I would wake up, and not recognize my surroundings. I’d panic, and it’d take a long time until I’d calm enough to fall back asleep, rinse and repeat.”
His brows furrow; she hears the hydraulic in his arm click as he expands his fingers one by one. “That’s not the same.”
“No, maybe not,” she agrees. “Last year, I... I changed. It’s a long story, and it has to do with alien races and family trees and experiments, but the short of it is, I’m no longer strictly human. I can hurt people. I have hurt people, unintentionally and intentionally. I fell asleep on the plane our team was on, and nearly made it crash, just because I had a bad dream.”
Barnes takes a careful step in her direction, his body swaying forward slightly. Like he wants to come closer but still doesn’t trust himself yet, and Skye knows that feeling.
“What happened to you?” he asks.
She looks down at her hands. “I can show you, but you need to get over here.”
For a long moment, he doesn’t move a muscle, stands there and eyes her like he’s trying to decide if she’s bullshitting him to get him closer, if she’s maybe got a syringe or a tranquilizer gun stashed somewhere and just wants him to get in range.
But then he shrugs and walks over, sits down next to her. “Go ahead.”
Skye holds out her hand and concentrates, sending a well-measured small wave to make the uprooted chairs shoot across the room until they hit the wall.
Barnes turns to look at her. There’s curiosity in his eyes, but no fear; she didn’t really expect any, but it’s still a surprise for someone to learn what she does and not stare at her with that measuring, fearful expression, like they’re assessing a threat.
“I see,” he says, and for the first time since she met him, his mouth curves into something in the neighborhood of a smile. He shrugs towards the mirror. “I think you freaked them out, though.”
She follows his gaze. “Maybe. But they aren’t the reason I’m in here.”
He turns to meet her eyes, and the man who looks back at her then isn’t Hydra’s weapon or the brainwashed assassin set to be on trial for atrocious crimes. He’s a guy in his twenties, worn and shell-shocked from a war that stopped for the rest of the world but never ended for him, who was changed and weaponized against his will like a lot of the powered people she works with on a daily basis. She remembers the old black and white photos, the easy grin, and averts her eyes.
“I’ll tell them to come in now, so they can clear up the room and you can go back to sleep,” Skye says, and he nods, his eyes still on her.
Instinctively, to offer reassurance, she inches a little bit closer. The team appears, right on cue, and while they work, carry out the broken chairs and tidy up the debris, he bumps her shoulder. She shoves him in retaliation, and when she looks up at him again he’s staring straight ahead, but she can still see him smile. Tentatively, she wraps her hand around his, and he squeezes back.
That’s how they stay until the clean-up team gives her the thumbs-up that means they’re done, she can leave, and she gets up to join up with her team, debrief, and go home.
***
The court room is filled to the brim with journalists and press that doesn’t deserve the name and people in certain positions who consider themselves important. But that’s okay; these days, SHIELD is becoming important again too, if only in the background, the shadows, just out of sight. Skye manages to find a seat exactly where she wants it – a little out of the public eye, but right in the line of sight from the witness stand. She only plans to go on for opening statements and when he’s set to testify, and for the ruling, but she ends up going every day.
When it’s his turn in the witness stand, she sits up a little straighter and doesn’t take her eyes off of him. He doesn’t look up at first, except for a few glances to Rogers, until the prosecutor tells him to speak up and address the jury. Then, his eyes roam the room, uncertain, until he sees her and they settle on her. He doesn’t look anywhere else for the entirety of his testimony, and she holds his eyes, listens as if it’s only the two of them again and the rest of the room doesn’t exist.
She’s there for the ruling too, watches him take his first step towards real freedom afterwards.
That same evening, her cell phone rings, the one with the number off the books and only a handful names in her contacts.
“I have a friend,” says none other than Captain America when she answers it, “who wants to know what it’s like to talk to you outside of a prison cell.”