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“Found. . .something,” Bucky’s voice crackled over the coms.
“What sort of something?” Sam asked, putting down the Hydra lab report he was browsing, a report about the simulation of long-chain fatty acids? It was all blurring into mush in his mind.
It had been a long morning of Hydra busting. This particular base, hiding in plain sight in the basement of a Department of Agriculture research facility, was turning out to be a repository of scientific knowledge. Full of rolls of microfiche, specimen drawers, expense records, and time sheets, it would be enough to keep the analyst team that would come in after them busy for several lifetimes.
It had been clear upon entry that the place had been deserted for decades, but procedure still called for them to do a thorough sweep. Check for booby traps, crazy human-AI crosses, you know.
So far, it was proving to be a great information treasure trove, and not much else. It was rare to find so much documentation. Hydra had a nasty habit of burning its books and killing its scientists when things started going south. More than weapons or alien technology, the information was what these missions were about.
Information was what they needed. Information was what they expected. Not ‘something’.
Sam refiled the fatty acids report.
“It’s,” Bucky waivered.
“Where are you?” Sam asked. “I’ll come take a look,”
“Sure,” Bucky said, but he sure didn’t sound sure.
That was the trouble with Hydra busting with Bucky; he knew what they were looking at a little too well. Sometimes he’d freeze up and Sam would need to hunt him down and sit with him and talk with him until he was thawed enough to get away. Sam had a sinking feeling in his gut that they were headed for one of those days.
“Second level, if you go down the main stairs it’s the fourth door on the left,” Bucky told him.
“Copy that, I’m on my way,”
When Sam arrived he found Bucky waiting for him in the hall, looking slightly grey.
“What is it?” Sam asked again.
Bucky swallowed, his adam’s apple bobbing.
“My arm,”
Sam frowned.
“Come in. It’s my arm,”
“The old chrome one?”
“No, they have my arm, Sam,”
Sam followed Bucky into a little storage room like a dozen others they’d seen. It was cramped with filing cabinets and smelt like musty paper.
And something else.
Bucky’s little electric lantern set up in the middle of the space cast harsh white light across the linoleum floor, nearly invisible under a quiet maelstrom of papers. And other things.
Sam’s foot slipped a little on a thin sheet of plastic. Leaning down, he picked it out of the mess. He held it to the lantern. Bucky watched him. When he realized what he was looking at, he almost dropped it.
An X-ray, of the left shoulder. Without the label, Sam wasn’t sure he’d have been able to identify that chunky mess, dotted with ghostly white screws and metal strips.
It was Bucky’s.
Bucky didn’t say anything. He just watched as Sam put down the X-ray and picked up something else. A flash of glass caught Sam’s eye. Sam braced for the next horror.
Again, he held it to the light. Again, he resisted the urge to drop it.
Sam was holding a microscope slide-mounted cross-section of Bucky’s radius. The delicate, honey-comb-like inside was dyed magenta.
Sam looked at his partner’s radius. Then he looked at his partner, silently sharing the same, dry office air as him.
Bucky met his gaze, then looked down at something in his hands. He was holding a little jar of formaldehyde very close to his chest.
Sam placed down Bucky’s radius and moved to stand by Bucky. Wordlessly, Bucky moved so Sam could look in the jar. A hand. A hand floated in the thin brown liquid.
“My hand,” Bucky said tonelessly.
He held his hand against the glass, the matching set reunited after all these years.
Sam rarely thought of Bucky as an amputee. His family was the same. He’d once mentioned Bucky’s missing arm in conversation and Cassidy had gotten very upset. ‘What’s wrong with Bucky’s arm?’ he’d asked. ‘What happened? Is he OK?’ Sam had assured him that Bucky’s lack of arm was very old news, and it was, about, what? Seventy years since that day on the train that had ended Steve’s Bucky’s life?
And here was Steve’s Bucky’s hand.
The preservation was almost perfect, down to the cuticles of his nails. His skin was yellowing a bit and there was a film of Sam didn’t want to know what at the bottom of the jar, but knuckles to nails, it was recognizably Bucky’s right’s missing pair.
Bucky shook the jar a little, sending the hand spinning and kicking up the suspicious sediments at the bottom.
“I got that scar from a pony,” Bucky said, as his hand slowed.
He tapped his metal finger on the glass. Sure enough, puckered white scar tissue crossed the palm.
“I wanted to pet its nose, but it wouldn’t let me. So I pretended to have a treat in my left hand and went in for a pet with my right. It bit me,”
“Serves you right, trying to trick that poor pony, Buck,”
“Well, I learned my lesson. There was a lot of blood.”
The hand bumped gently against the top of the jar.
“How old were you?”
Bucky shifted his weight a little, a faint blush rising in his cheeks.
“Uh, twenty six,” he muttered.
Sam couldn’t help his smirk.
“It was a cute pony, OK?”
“Must have been,”
“It was like an oreo cookie, Sam. It had a black front and a black back end and in between it was white.”
“. . .like a cow?”
“No, it wasn't spotty. It was like an oreo, like, big bands,”
Bucky drew “big bands” in the air with his metal hand.
“This pony had a big impression on you,”
“Yeah, well. It put me in hospital. Couldn’t hold my rifle for weeks. Injured in the line of duty, by a pony,”
“You were at war at that point?”
“Yeah,”
“Was it an enemy agent?”
“A German pony?” Bucky said. “I guess it must have been, that brute had a taste for blood, let me tell you,”
Bucky smiled softly. Sam couldn’t quite name what he saw in Bucky’s eyes as he looked at his hand.
“You have two hands,” Bucky said suddenly.
“Yes,” Sam agreed, “so do you. One of yours is metal,”
Bucky nodded. He was silent for a while, then he said: “But, there’s something human in hands. You know, A.J. told me that the bodies of castaways, you can tell if they’ve been cannibalized because most people will cut off the hands and the head before eating someone; makes the body look less human,”
“A.J. told you that?”
“We were talking about his history project, for school,”
“Right,”
Sam nodded.
“About cannibalisme?”
“Arctic explorers, looking for trade routes. That’s the cost of business sometimes, I guess,” Bucky said.
“Huh,”
They both looked at Bucky’s hand.
“Losing your arm doesn’t make you less human, Buck,”
“That’s not what I said,”
“It’s kinda what you said,”
“I didn’t lose my arm, Sam,”
An edge crept into Bucky’s voice. Still holding his left hand to his chest, he picked a file from right next to the lamp and passed it to Sam.
“Read it.”
Sam opened the manila folder. Tissue-thin typewriter paper slid into his hands. He squinted at the words, eerily lit by the lamp. Too long, not enough vowels, “I don’t speak German,”
Bucky snatched it back.
Sam noticed that Bucky was trembling slightly. He pretended he didn't.
Bucky rooted through the pages until he found one he was looking for, then he started translating.
“Names of bones. . . on the left. . measurements, showing, advanced gangrene. Dates, uh, weeks” Bucky turned the page, “blood tests,” page turn, “uh, monitoring gangrene. . .progression in enhanced American subject, compared to three expendables,” Bucky spat the word.
“Serum, unable to heal gangrenous tissue, ulna removed, two expendable deaths,” page turn, “radius remains, gangrene spreads above elbow in enhanced American subject,” page turn “dates, third expendable death,” page turn, “serum proven . . .ineffective against gangrene, transfer of enhanced American subject and immediate amputation of . . .remaining. . .names of bones, recommended, ASAP, I didn’t ‘lose’ my arm, Sam,”
He snapped the folder closed.
Sam wearily sat down. He rubbed the back of his head.
“That’s disgusting,” Sam said.
“Pardon?”
There was a manic note in Bucky’s voice.
“That a person would do that to another person. That’s disgusting. That’s, untenable. Bucky, I don't know what to say. I’m sorry,”
Bucky deflated. He sat down next to Sam.
“Me too,” he quietly agreed. He leaned over till his shoulder rested on Sam’s.
“Where’s the humanity in that, huh?” Bucky asked.
“That’s not on you,”
“They did it to me. Because of me, those expendables, God-”
“That’s not your fault, Buck,”
“I know. Doesn’t change what happened.”
He wiped his nose with his thumb.
“Doesn’t change how I changed, ‘cause of that. It changes you.” Bucky took a deep breath. “And, and what if, I can’t change what they did, but what I did? The way I responded to that? That’s, that’s on me, and I just-”
“-You’re not being fair to yourself, Buck. And you’re not being fair to-” Sam read the by-line on the gangrene file, “-Dard Sinclair, taking all his credit. You had a team of scientists systematically working against you. For decades. It’s not your fault.”
“Doesn’t change anything. Either way, I’m Frankenstein, so-”
“-don’t talk that way about my partner-”
“-love of-”
“-no, Buck, listen-”
“-NO,”
Bucky shrunk away from Sam, startled by his own voice. Sam shut up.
“No,” Bucky repeated, quieter.
“It changes you,” Bucky said, “bein’ treated like that. It-, Sam, I- sorry,”
Bucky rubbed his eyes.
“I just, it changes you. When no one comes.”
Bucky’s voice trembled.
“When you scream for help and no one ever comes. No one ever comes. And you scream and scream. I guess, I stopped screaming. And that’s, well, that’s a hard habit to break. So don’t tell me I’m fine, because I’m not and I know I’m not, and I’m, I’m working on it. Sam, so don’t pull a Steve on me, OK? Just don’t. I know I’m not, right, and I don’t need you telling me I’m, I’m, normal. Just. Don’t.”
Bucky stared at his lap, face ghoulishly lit from below by the lamp.
“Please.”
Now it was Sam’s turn to lean over, bump Bucky’s shoulder.
“OK,”
They sat together for a long moment. Until Bucky’s hands stopped shaking.
“You know,” Sam said, “the real test of your humanity, Buck,”
“Sam-” Bucky said, strained.
“-would you still pet the pony?”
That caught him out. Bucky frowned.
“The nose.” Bucky corrected, “real soft nose,”
“Would you still pet the oreo pony’s nose, if you had the chance?”
Bucky’s frown quirked up at the side.
“Fuck yeah,”