Chapter Text
The cell doors clanged shut up and down the hall. It was “bedtime.” More like early evening, but days around the prison started around 4:00 a.m., so his sleep schedule (if you could call it that) had adjusted. Just add that to the list of ways he was entirely out of touch with current society. That list was ever growing. The more he learned about the world, the more comfortable he felt in the cramped, cold, 6’ x 9’ cell. At least he was secure enough in here. At least he could just keep his mouth shut and his head down and be left alone.
His plan when he arrived was to do just that – keep the distance. An…incident occurred where he had to protect himself. This was prison, after all. His fellow inmates had heard about him, the famous soldier that turned himself in after decades of assassinations and terrorist attacks and had accepted a death sentence as punishment for his crimes. He had let them stare and point and wonder out loud was he “really as tough as the news said without that metal arm?” Then someone tested the theory and threw a punch and instinct kicked in. He spent several weeks in lock-up – no other inmates, none of his meager belongings that he had accumulated in his short stay, and no yard time. But no one ever bothered him again. When he was released back to his block, he and his attacker made eye contact and briefly nodded to one another, a silent agreement to respect his boundaries.
Boundaries are important, the psychiatrist that is supposed to come by every week to meet with him says so. But the budget is shit and she has an entire prison to see to and he is just one guy that’s already destined for death. He sees her every month or so and they speak through the bars for a few minutes. She jots down notes that say he denies any suicidal and homicidal tendencies. That’s all they care about in here – don’t spill any blood, yours or someone else’s; it might stain the concrete.
He's been in worse situations. The people around him were mostly okay. He knows that you don’t get to death row without something a screw or two loose in your brain, but everyone had settled into a routine of sorts. Wake up at 4:00 a.m. Get your breakfast tray delivered by a fellow inmate. Eat the tray or save it to trade for other stuff later. Lay in bed until the cell doors open. Watch the crowds venture out into the day room to watch TV or use the tablets that are passed out around this same time. Get locked back in your cell for lunch around 10:30 a.m. Then count would happen, where everything would shut down until each and every inmate in the prison was accounted for. Have the doors open again. Back in your cell for dinner around 4:00 p.m. Mail call for those lucky enough to get letters. Watch the other guys fight about what to put on the TV after dinner.
He didn’t leave his cell much. Only to run laps, order from the commissary if there was money on his books, or to trade with the few inmates he spoke with to get a new book or something else that would help pass the time.
The soldier sat on his thin, prison-issued mattress with his back against the wall. He waited for the quiet – a rarity in prison. He felt himself begin to doze and tried to fight it. He knew what sleep held.
He was a trained soldier, a spy, a quiet and lethal weapon. He never woke up screaming. Noise had been tortured out of him. But every night he would wake up in a flop sweat, tangled in his thin blanket, his one hand clutching his pillow in a way that he knew a metal hand had gripped necks before breaking them. A constant reminder of why he was in prison. A constant reminder that he was not a good person. A constant reminder he was not stable.
He might have preferred complete isolation. His lawyers had fought for that not to happen. They hired experts to talk about how he could adapt to prison life and how isolation would only make the soldier worse. He knew that a certain friend of his, one that he wasn’t speaking with right now, had also made a call. When Captain America makes a request, people tend to listen.
On his first day, the Warden had given him some speech about death row would be better for him since he wasn’t allowed to have a prosthetic arm and the guys on the row were less likely to pick fights. How death row would be better than being in protective custody or solitary 24/7. The soldier heard the warning in the Warden’s voice, that he was not to cause any trouble either.
Other than the first and only fight, that was true. The inmates on death row were mostly older, some even as old as 75, and for the most part everyone got along. He had heard a saying about inmates running the asylum and that was pretty true here. The inmates worked out schedules and jobs for one another. Not real prison jobs where they’d get paid or work toward time off of their sentence like you’d find in general population, but jobs that people volunteered to do to help the block run more smoothly. His block held monthly meetings – not that he ever went - to discuss any issues or problems the inmates were having so that they could be organized in the way it was presented to the Warden by the unofficial block leader. On his first day, that leader, a tall, middle-aged Black man, came over to his cell calmly and quietly and handed him a bag with a toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, and shampoo.
“You won’t be able to get anything from the commissary for a while, consider this your welcome bag. How are you holding up?”
The only response was a wary stare.
“I get it, this is all a lot. My name is Jimmie. Come find me if you need anything. I’m just three houses down.”
Jimmie gently set the bag down on the bed and turned to go.
“…houses?”
Jimmie turned around. “Yeah, man, you know, our cells. It’s depressing as shit to call them cells all day. We live here, don’t we? These are our houses. We’re your neighbors. Come borrow a cup of sugar anytime,” Jimmie grinned.
The soldier grunted an acknowledgment of thanks. Jimmie knew what those first days were like. That’s why he had started the welcome bag project. Some people on the block got money from their families. Others didn’t have any family left, lost either to death or disownment. The prison staff was only there to make sure they lived long enough to execute them. So, he made sure that the block took care of its own. Everyone had the necessities, and everyone deserved a treat now and then.
Jimmie checked in pretty much every day. Just a quick nod in the soldier’s direction, a questioning face as if to say, “you ready to be friends yet, neighbor?” He wasn’t.
He wasn’t even speaking to his friends from the before times. At first, Steve tried to stay in touch. He sent daily letters and the soldier would return to sender without opening them. Steve tried to get on the soldier’s visitation list, but the visits were refused. The soldier eventually figured out how the prison-issued tablet worked and when he logged in, he could see that Steve had sent him a dozen or so messages on the prison-sponsored app. He blocked Steve there and never logged in again. Months went by. Steve eventually took the hint. The visits stopped. The letters dwindled until none came for the soldier. Still, $50 was applied to his books every month without fail or fanfare.
The next months were the same. Over and over.
Wake up. Breakfast. Tablet. Lunch. Count. TV. Dinner. No mail. Bedtime. Nightmares.
Wake up. Breakfast. Tablet. Lunch. Count. TV. Dinner. No mail. Bedtime. Nightmares.
Wake up. Breakfast. Tablet. Lunch. Count. TV. Dinner. No mail. Bedtime. Nightmares.
Wake up. Breakfast. Tablet. Lunch. Count. TV. Dinner –
“Barnes! Mail call!”
The soldier’s head shot up at the sound of his name. He stood up and leaned against the cell bars.
“I don’t want it,” said Barnes. The guard shrugged and tapped the envelope on the bars in a cocky way that made Barnes bristle.
“It’s legal mail, you have to take it.” The bright red stamp across the envelope confirmed what the guard said. “LEGAL MAIL. OPEN ONLY IN PRESENCE OF INMATE.” The guard opened the envelope, shook the contents out to ensure no contraband was being sent in, and handed it all to Barnes. The soldier unfolded the letter, confused.
“Dear Sgt. Barnes,
My name is Franklin Nelson and my firm has been appointed to represent you in the appellate and any clemency process. I imagine that Captain Rogers has kept you up to date on the recent activity in Congress surrounding the events of the Sokovia Accords failure…”
There was more, but the soldier stopped reading, crumpling the letter in his hand. Fucking Steve. He never could just let things go. Barnes belonged here. He belonged in prison. He was a danger to society and he should be locked away.
Days passed since the letter had arrived and Barnes stewed. He paced. He growled. He ran laps in the yard until he thought the summer humidity would make him collapse. He wrote draft after draft of letters to Steve and to that Franklin Nelson guy. Nothing sounded angry enough. He didn’t send any of the letters.
Finally, he made his way to the phone and placed a collect call to the Law Firm of Nelson and Murdock. He waited, impatiently of course, for the recorded message to play and for someone to answer.
==========
“You have a collect call from the Department of Corrections. Press 5 to accept the call from – Barnes. Press 1 to block all future calls. To ignore this call, please hang up.” The inmates were told to record their names for these phone calls so the first time she heard his voice was this, a short, angry, burst of just his last name wedged in between the soft, robotic, female voice.
She was Charlotte, a paralegal working at The Law Office of Nelson and Murdock. She had been there for a few years now and had seen so much happen. Franklin “Foggy” Nelson and Matt Murdock, her bosses and attorneys, were talented and respected (mostly) and they knew that the justice system was broken. She appreciated that and knew that if she wanted a chance to change things and to help people, they were the ones that would lead the charge.
She yelled back towards the offices as she pressed 5, “Foggy, it’s James Barnes calling finally!”
The line beeped and she said “Hi, Sergeant Barnes. My name is Charlotte, I’m Mr. Nelson and Mr. Murdock’s paralegal. I’m so glad you called.”
Silence. She could hear familiar prison sounds in the background so she knew the line wasn’t dead.
Barnes wasn’t expecting a friendly voice. He had his mouth open, ready to yell profanities and refuse representation but the gentleman in him couldn’t yell at a lady. His mouth opened and closed a couple of times. He knew she must think he was an idiot for not saying anything.
“Mr. Barnes? Oh, I mean, Sergeant Barnes, I’m sorry – can you hear me? Sometimes prison phones have bad connections, do you want to try to call back and –"
“I can hear you.”
She leaned back in her chair and anxiously fiddled with her necklace. She knew she must have sounded like an idiot but she was always worried about making a good first impression on a new client. Clients didn’t always appreciate her role at first so she always tried extra hard to show how valuable she could be.
“Oh, great, I’m glad. What can I do for you? Do you want to speak with Mr. Nelson?” She typed a message to Foggy in Teams.
Charlotte: Foggy! Did you hear me? Barnes is on the phone!
“You sound busy, I can call back later,” Barnes said. He could hear her typing. This call and his anger weren’t meant for her. There had already been too many innocent bystanders that were caught in the crossfires of his past.
“I’m never too busy to talk to a client. That’s literally my job. I’m trying to see if I can get Foggy – that’s what we call Mr. Nelson – out of his meeting.”
“Never mind, just tell him I don’t want this.”
And then the line went dead. The whole exchange took less than two minutes.
Foggy finally came up to the front desk and held out his hand for the phone, which was now held away from her face in her limp wrist. She stared at the phone and then looked up at Foggy, who was impatiently waiting.
“Well, that might be a record for you, Foggy.”
“What do you mean?”
“James Barnes just fired you without even speaking with you.”
“Oh no, Captain America is going to kill me,” Foggy moaned, leaning on her desk, face in his hands in his classic dramatic fashion.
She heard Matt cackling from his office and just grinned as Foggy continued his act.
==========
“Press 5 to accept the call from – Barnes.” She smashed 5 and messaged Foggy that Barnes was calling again. It was the first they had heard from him since the short call last week.
“Hi, it’s Charlotte again. I’m glad you called back.”
Shit. He didn’t know why he thought someone else would answer. He picked a different time of day and different day of the week. He (correctly) guessed that she must be the only employee at the office.
“Yeah. I just wanted to say again, I don’t want this or need this. You guys can focus on other things. I’m where I – I’m fine.”
“Can Foggy and I come visit you? We can talk more about this in person. I don’t trust prison phone lines.”
Foggy was standing over her desk, trying to listen. He had heard her talk down plenty of frantic clients before. He trusted her. It’s one of the reasons she stayed at this firm, despite higher paying offers from big firms.
“No. No need. Seems like too much trouble.” Barnes tripped over his tongue. This wasn’t going how he wanted it to go.
“Well, I’ve already requested the legal visit. It’s for next week. We’re going to be flying in. I hope you’ll come out. We can just get to know each other if you don’t want to spend too much time on your case. Foggy is boring, but I’m a delight, you and I – ”
Click.
She looked up at Foggy, who had a concerned look on his face. “Wait, am I really boring?”
Charlotte just grinned. Law was boring, people and their stories were the things that kept her coming to work every day.
“And do we really have a visit booked next week? Do I know anything that's going on around here?” Foggy asked, suddenly realizing that he hadn’t seen that entry on his calendar.
“Nope, but I’m getting one set up right now.”
==========
Monday of next week came and Barnes was even more grouchy than usual. Jimmie made sure that no one else bothered him – not that it was normally an issue, the neighbors quickly figured out that he would prefer to be left alone.
For the third time in as many weeks, Barnes found himself standing at the phone, dialing a number that he had already memorized. He waited for the recordings and for her – no, not her, the law office, the lawyer, the people he doesn’t want – to accept the collect call.
“Hi again.”
He grit his teeth when she answered.
“What’s up? What can I do for you?” she asked before he could respond to her greeting.
“I know you have to pay for these calls for me. I’m keeping it short. I wanted to tell you not to come visit. That’s all. Goodbye.” He moved the phone away from his ear until he heard,
“Wait, don’t hang up!”
“What?” he grunted.
She smiled into the receiver.
“We’ll be there Thursday at 1:30 p.m. Flights, hotels, and cat-sitter are booked. Non-refundable.”
“Non-refundable…thought the future would make it easier to cancel on people,” he mused. She chuckled and he caught one side of lip curl into a smile. Just a reflex. He fixed his face and sighed.
“So, we’ll see you on Thursday if you want to come out, Sergeant Barnes. We can keep it short and painless, I promise.”
No one had promised him something painless in a long, long time.
==========
Prison visits aren’t exactly glamorous. She and Foggy dressed in comfortable but professional clothes. Nothing tight. Nothing baggy. Always in layers because you never knew when the A/C or heat would be on the fritz. No belts. Sneakers, because there were too many heels or loafers that would set off the metal detectors. No jewelry except a watch; specifically, what Foggy has dubbed a “dumb watch,” since it only told time and didn’t give you GPS directions or push notifications or count your steps or monitor if your heart skipped a beat. No underwire bra, which always annoyed her – not because wireless bras weren’t more comfortable, that was an objective fact, but because there had been more than one time that she forgot and had to run to the nearest store and buy a sports bra. After the second time, she kept a bra in her car like some people keep jumper cables. When she had to fly to a prison, like today, she only packed wireless bras. Better to be safe than denied entry at the prison gates.
She absently picked at her nails while waiting for the escort to the visitation room. She had assured Foggy that Barnes would show up to the visit, but a not so small part of her doubted it. Inmates were always allowed to refuse visits. It was one of the small ways they actually had any control over their lives anymore and some exercised that control whenever they needed to feel human again. Steve Rogers had told Matt and Foggy how Barnes had rejected every visit, every letter, every message. Who did she and Foggy think they were that they could make the Winter Soldier come out of his cell?
“You’ll be in visiting booth 12.” The guard pointed them towards the small booth.
Like many others prisons and jails she had been to, this one had non-contact legal visits. Their client would sit behind concrete walls and dirty glass reinforced with wire mesh and try to hold complex legal conversations with them about their cases and their lives through a garbled speaker in the wall. Imagine telling someone that they lost their case again when you can’t hold their hand in support or asking someone you’ve known for a month to tell you about their extreme childhood trauma without really being able to see their face because of the bright glare caught in the glass. Too many times she had seen her clients and friends cry behind the glass and the most she could do was put a hand on that glass and hope they could feel her support.
She and Foggy went into the small visitation booth and waited. There were two metal stools fused to the floor on their side of the glass. They were a little early, but she was still getting more anxious by the second that he wouldn’t show. Finally, she heard a familiar clang and moments later the door on the other side opened. There was The Winter Soldier. Minus, of course, that notorious metal arm.
He had his one arm handcuffed tightly to his belly chain and his ankles chained together. His hair was shorter than the pictures from the news, no doubt a prison policy. His beard was trimmed neatly. His jumpsuit had the left arm crudely cut off and the empty sleeve of the white t-shirt underneath hung limply. He looked them squarely in the eyes; hers warm and a little nervous, Foggy’s overexcited and welcoming.
Before the guard could leave Barnes to their meeting, she quickly asked for him to be uncuffed.
“I have things for him to review and sign, he needs full use of his hand.” The guard hesitated but ultimately obliged.
“I’ll come get the papers for him to sign.” She left the visitation booth to meet the guard with a stack of papers and a pen. She heard Foggy launch into his well-rehearsed speech about the slow-turning wheels of justice, what his representation meant, and what the client could expect. She had heard it many times, but she clocked the slightly higher pitch to Foggy’s voice, giving away his anxiety.
“He can’t use your pen, he has to use ours,” the guard grumbled at her.
“Oh, that’s perfectly fine. Is it blue? I really prefer blue, easier to tell the originals from the copies.”
The guard just stared at her, took the papers, and walked back through the door to reach Barnes. He handed the stack of papers to Barnes, who was staring past Foggy at the door behind him. Foggy was still trying to explain his role in the case and how he was appointed when she came back into the booth. Barnes made sharp eye contact with her for a moment. He was disturbingly still to be sitting on what she knew was an uncomfortable stool.
“ – and so I think you actually have some really great claims to make in federal court, not to mention the possibility of a full re-sentencing given your…history,” explained Foggy.
Barnes’ jaw tightened. He still hadn’t said a word.
She jumped in. “Sorry, he forgets himself sometimes when he gets excited about the law. I’m Charlotte, we’ve talked on the phone. I’m really just here for you. I help Matt and Foggy tell your story. It’s always easier to get in touch with me than it is with them, so please call me anytime.”
Barnes didn’t react. He tentatively picked up the first piece of paper in the stack that she had passed back to him and gave her a questioning look.
“Oh, I always bring something for you to look at or to sign to the prison. They will use any excuse to keep your cuffs on and I don’t think that’s fair,” she explained. “But there are actually some releases of information right on top there that I would like for you to sign today, if that’s okay with you. That just helps us get records that help tell your story.”
Foggy launched into more talk about his case and what the initial steps would be if Barnes didn’t refuse representation.
“What are the odds of this working?” Barnes asked when Foggy finally ran out of words.
“I mean, the odds are always better when you have Captain America as a friend and advocate. But the odds are usually pretty slim, unfortunately,” Foggy said gently.
“So you’ve signed up to get paid to lose?” Barnes asked, sarcasm heavy on his tongue.
“I don’t ever sign up to lose. I sign up to help and to fight for people I know are worth it,” said Foggy.
Barnes finally shifted.
“You know that you are, right? Worth it, I mean,” she asked softly. “Sergeant Barnes, we’re here because we want to help you. Not because we’re ordered to.”
A beat passes. Another. And one more.
Before Foggy or Charlotte can open their mouths to fill the silence, Barnes scribbled his signature on the release of information forms and twists to knock on the door, summoning the guard. He hands the releases to the guard, careful not to crumple them.
“I’m ready to go back,” Barnes said to the guard without a nod or acknowledgment to her or Foggy as his hand is cuffed back to his belly chain. But he took the remaining stack of papers with him back to his house.
“I…think we’re hired?”