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Rumlow rounded the corner into the apartment and saw his target shoving a knee into the asset's chest. The soldier recovered quickly and twisted around, taking the man’s arm with him. Rumlow’s gun hovered, aiming, but they were too close to each other and he couldn’t get a clean shot. Fuck.
The man spun around to the front of the soldier and managed to give him a solid kick in his instep, throwing him off balance. The soldier grunted, lashing out with a punch to the head, but the attack fell flat and the man dodged his titanium fist easily. As he crouched down, he shot out a boot straight into the soldier’s left knee. The asset grunted and stumbled backward, trying to recover from the blow, but he skittered on shattered glass from a broken window behind him.
Rumlow watched in horror as the soldier twisted and tried to grab the window’s frame with his metal fingers. He missed by a fraction. Rumlow saw him bump into the windowsill and then topple over the edge in slow motion. For a moment, their eyes met and the soldier looked absolutely terrified. Then, he fell, ass-first into the night.
The man who had kicked the soldier out the window turned to face Rumlow and leveled a handgun in his face. Rumlow ducked down and fired off a round into the man’s own kneecap, then thought better of it and shot him squarely between the eyes. Much better.
Rumlow took a few steps to the window and looked down. The soldier was sprawled on the snow-covered ground below them. They were 6 stories up. The fall was, easily, sixty feet. While the soldier was generally pretty good at handling heights, getting kicked out of a window probably wasn’t the same as a calculated jump. Rumlow squinted down into the darkness. There had been nothing for the asset to use to slow his fall. He had just slammed into the ground like a sack of bricks.
“Shit,” Rumlow whispered, turning around and running out of the apartment, heading for the stairwell they’d entered through. This was not going to plan.
Rumlow thundered down the stairs, his rifle slung over his back and his boots echoing on the metal steps like gunshots.
As he threw open the access door to the ground floor, he noticed that the soldier was no longer laying on the ground where he’d fallen. Instead, he was leaning against the side of the building, beneath a dim floodlight. He was bent in half, his human hand hovering, palm up, beneath his mouth, like he was trying to keep something from falling out of it.
Rumlow’s stomach dropped, but it was a better scenario than he was expecting. The asset was fine. Probably.
“Hey!” Rumlow shouted, jogging toward the soldier. The soldier turned to look at him, but Rumlow couldn’t see the expression on his face in the pale light. He could see blood covering most of him, though, and it made his stomach turn. As he got closer, he could see that blood was pooling in the palm the hand that the soldier was still holding beneath his face. More blood drooled out the side of his mouth. Rumlow hadn’t seen that much blood come out of the soldier in a while. His stomach flopped again. He wasn’t squeamish, but he usually like the blood to come from the enemy, not pour from the mouth of the very expensive Hydra property he was in charge of.
“What happened?” Rumlow asked stupidly, coming to a stop in front of the asset. The soldier looked at him with an expression somewhere between disbelief and agony. "Yeah, sorry, dumb question." he agreed. Looking closer, Rumlow could see now that the angle of the soldier’s jaw was all wrong, the left side jutting sideways more than the other. He’d honestly never seen a broken jaw before. It wasn’t nice to look at.
“Oh, that’s great,” Rumlow sighed, finally reaching out and moving the soldier’s hand out from beneath his mouth and guiding it down. The blood in his palm splashed into the snow and more joined it as it continued to dribble out of the corner of his mouth. Probably bit his tongue when he hit the ground. His nose looked a little crooked, too.
“You hurt anywhere else?” Rumlow asked, looking him up and down. After a moment of consideration, the asset shook his head slowly.
“Good,” Rumlow replied, grabbing the soldier’s metal arm and dragging him out from under the flood light. “Time to go.”
_____
Rumlow angrily rooted around in the bathroom cabinet of the safehouse, stealing glances through the open door to make sure the soldier was still sitting at the kitchen table where he had put him. He was. His face looked disgusting. He was covered in blood and his jaw was beginning to swell and bruise. Blood still dripped, occasionally, from the corner of his crooked mouth like someone had forgotten to completely turn off the tap.
He was trying hard not to be angry at the soldier, but it was proving to be more difficult than he'd expected. Two days with the asset was usually a cake walk. But now he was going to have to play nurse and that was not something he was ever in the mood for. He liked the soldier a lot more when he was completely self-sufficient and didn’t need to be looked after. It was kind of Rumlow’s policy that, once they stepped foot into the safehouse for the evening, he just ignored the soldier completely. He was beginning to get a little cranky thinking about that particular change to his routine.
Finally, behind several bottles of old shampoo, conditioner and a few other things he couldn’t identify, Rumlow found the large trauma bag that had been stashed there. He dragged it out and grabbed a few clean towels from the rack on his way back to the kitchen. He marched up to the kitchen table and dropped the bag down with a ‘thud’. As he unzipped the biggest compartment, he saw the soldier shift uncomfortably in his seat.
“Can you move your jaw at all?” Rumlow asked, taking out a few packages of saline. The asset seemed to do something with his mouth that made him moan in the back of his throat. After a moment, he shook his head, ‘No’.
“Great.” Rumlow sighed, shaking his head and pushing the trauma bag to the side. He walked around to the soldier’s side of the table and dropped one of the towels into the asset’s lap. The soldier looked down at it and touched it with his fingers, pulling it against him and gripping it tight, like Rumlow was going to take it away. Rumlow reached over and grabbed a bottle of saline and another towel. “Lean forward.” He said, making a nondescript motion with his hand.
The soldier did as he was told and leaned forward over the towel in his lap. His hair fell over his face and Rumlow had to pull the greasy strands back and tuck them behind his ears. The asset's eyes looked glassy and he felt him shudder when he put a hand on his left shoulder to hold him steady. He could feel the seam of the metal arm beneath the soldier’s clothes and a few of the plates shifted under his palm.
Without much preamble, Rumlow tore the cap off one of the saline bottles and dumped it over the asset’s face. Pink water and grit splashed down onto the towel and the soldier moaned, twitching in pain. Rumlow raised the towel in his hand and roughly wiped the bloody water away from the soldier’s cheek and chin, not even trying to be gentle. In some sadistic part of his brain, he kind of wanted it to hurt. Order through pain. Maybe next time he wont let himself get dropped from six stories up.
The soldier moaned louder this time and twisted in his seat, trying desperately to keep still as the towel dug concrete and dirt out of his face. As Rumlow swiped the towel back and forth along the soldier’s jaw, he felt something shift and the asset suddenly lurched forward, wrenching himself away.
“Hey!” Rumlow growled, pushing the heel of his hand into the soldier’s collarbone and shoving him back in the seat. “Stop.” The soldier made a pained sound, like he was trying to say something. Rumlow ignored him and continued until the soldier’s face was dry and clean of blood.
When he was finished, he tossed the now-bloody towel onto the table and it landed with a ‘slap’. The soldier looked down at it before looking back up at Rumlow with a look of absolute misery. His eyes were red-rimmed and he was breathing unsteadily through his nose, as if this was the worst pain he had ever experienced. It was all very dramatic.
“Don’t. Move.” Rumlow reminded him as he reached out and curled a hand around the back of the asset’s neck, tightening his grip threateningly. With his other hand, he pressed into the swollen knot just bellow the soldier’s left ear, at the hinge of his jaw. He felt something shift under his fingers, as it had before. He could feel the space between the jawbones. It was a clean break. The asset tensed and shuddered, but otherwise remained still.
Concentrating, he continued to move his fingers down along the jaw, stopping just beneath the soldier’s bottom lip and pressing down again. He felt the bone give in the unmistakable fashion of a fracture. This time the asset lurched back with a muffled shout, meeting the resistance of Rumlow’s hand on his neck and he thrashed wildly, like an animal caught in a trap.
Rumlow growled and jumped, grabbing the soldier’s chin in his hand and pulling it toward him before he could stop himself. Something cracked loudly under his fingers and the soldier’s entire body convulsed, bucking up in the chair. The soldier opened his mouth as much as he could and shouted, the sound coming out like a howl.
“Jesus,” Rumlow swore, letting go of the soldier completely and watching him bolt upright, knocking the chair backwards onto the floor. The soldier reached up with his metal hand, not quite touching the place where Rumlow had grabbed him, and moaned again through slack lips.
“Fuck!” Rumlow shouted, his heart hammering in his chest. The soldier shut his eyes and shifted on his feet, clearly in agony.
Rumlow was having a hard time feeling sympathetic. It was the asset’s own fault. If he had just been a little faster, Rumlow would be posted up on the couch, warming his feet by the heater and nursing a beer. But, nope, not today. The asset had go and let himself get shoved out a fucking window.
There was a long moment when the asset did nothing but breath and glare at Rumlow from where he stood against the wall. Rumlow let him do it for a while before he started losing his patience.
“Sit. Down.” Rumlow demanded, pointing at the chair. The soldier still didn’t move and Rumlow had the intense desire to go over and grab his broken face again, just to make a point. But he didn’t. He never made much headway with the soldier when he got physically angry, even though the soldier had a very bad habit of bringing it out in him. He had to calm down. That was the only real way to make any progress when it came to the soldier. So, instead, he took a few deep breaths and held up his hands in a defeated gesture.
“Ok,” Rumlow said, lowering his voice and walking over to chair. He picked it up and set it back on all four feet gently. “I’ll leave you alone.”
The asset watched him, warily, the metal arm slowly falling away from where it hovered over his face. He looked like he was about to cry. The entire left side was swelling up and the bruises looked deep and painful. Rumlow winced, finally putting all the broken bones together to figure out that the guy must have landed face-first on the concrete. He briefly imagined what that must have felt like. He was lucky he didn’t break his fucking neck.
“I don’t have a way to feed you anything, so you’ll just have to deal with that,” Rumlow said, walking back over to the trauma bag and zipping up the pockets. “But we should be outta here tomorrow if this weather clears.”
The soldier didn’t respond. He couldn’t. He just stood there, swelling up like a corpse in the sun and breathing out sad sounds through his broken nose. Rumlow rolled his eyes and headed into the kitchen. He was starving.
__________
It was the next day when the asset began to get belligerent. It wasn’t out of character for him to become difficult the longer he was out of cryo and Rumlow had dealt with that plenty of times without much effort. This, however, was different. The soldier was becoming angry toward Rumlow and it was starting to become worrisome.
It didn’t take long for Rumlow to realize that what was going on was because the soldier hadn’t eaten or drank a single thing in more than 24 hours. For a normal human, that wasn’t life threatening, but to someone with the metabolism of the soldier, it was agony. On most missions, the soldier had to consume upwards of four thousand calories every few hours. It was standard knowledge when working with the soldier. Peek performance drifted after just eight hours without food.
This was the problem Rumlow had been dreading from the start. The trauma bag contained a saline drip that Rumlow used up already and the effects of the hydration had warn off earlier that morning, right around the time he received communication from Rollins that their evac was delayed a day due to the shitty weather conditions.
“If this job doesn’t kill me, the fucking weather will,” Rumlow grumbled to himself, as he walked into the living room with a bottle of water. The soldier was sitting up on the couch, drifting in and out of sleep, his head bobbing up and down as he tried to doze through the agony and hunger.
Rumlow stopped in front of him and twisted the cap off the bottle. The soldier looked up, his bruised and swollen face wobbling a little.
“You’re gonna drink this,” Rumlow said, holding the bottle out in front of him. The asset made no move to take it and just stared at him, looking incredibly angry. After a minute, he shook his head.
Rumlow stepped forward a little so he was almost toe-to-toe with him and looked down at the sad, disgusting heap of a man beneath him. The soldier scowled and shook his head again, clenching his fists into the couch cushions beside him.
“You’re dehydrated and you’re hungry,” Rumlow explained, slowly, hoping the soldier was tracking. “We should be out of here in a day, but for now I need you to try and work with me.”
The soldier didn’t do anything for a long minute, but after a while, he dropped the scowl and his eyes started getting red with tears. Rumlow sighed and rolled his eyes.
“If you drink the fucking water, you’ll feel better,” he said, gritting his teeth around a flare of frustration at the childish behavior. Rumlow wasn’t married and he didn’t have kids. There was a reason for that.
The asset turned his head away from Rumlow and sniffed a little, his tongue darting out to try lick at his swollen bottom lip. Finally, he gave a curt little nod and turned back.
Rumlow let out the breath he didn’t know he had been holding and leaned forward over the soldier’s body. He pressed his free hand into the cushion near the soldier’s head to keep his balance and the other hand held the water bottle close to the soldier’s mouth.
“Lean your head back,” he said, demonstrating the motion with his own head. The soldier tilted backward, his hair spilling over Rumlow’s hand on the cushion. The soldier, to his credit, tried to open his mouth as Rumlow pressed the bottle against his bottom lip. He tipped the container up, letting a trickle of water run into the soldier’s mouth. The asset immediately choked on it and the water spluttered out and down his chin. Rumlow swore and pulled the bottle back. The soldier coughed and his face twisted into agony as the motion tore through his jaw. His titanium hand shot up to try and grab the bottle away from Rumlow.
“No,” Rumlow barked, pulling the bottle back out of his reach. They were going to fucking do this. “Head back. Try again.”
The soldier took a steadying breath and his chest hitched with another aborted cough. Rumlow tilted the bottle again and let another rivulet of water into the soldier’s mouth. This time, the soldier seemed to be able to work his tongue enough to swallow the water with a noisy gulp. It reminded Rumlow of a fish trying to breathe out of water. He waited until the wet mouth sounds stopped before he tipped another sip of water into the soldier’s mouth.
“See? This isn’t so bad,” Rumlow said, nodding down at the asset and smiling. The soldier just glared back through a face full of bruises and broken bones.