Chapter Text
He was left standing by the door to the observation room and he sighed in annoyance. Can't people even leave doors open these days? Leave people feeling welcome? Apparently HYDRA can't do that because they're stupid so he has to open doors like these himself.
He opened the door huffily, expecting nothing behind the door but instead stopped short of the threshold feeling winded.
The room was as forgettable as they come, but that wasn't what he was fixated on, no. What he was staring wide eyed at was Stevie, who he hadn't seen for 4200 hours, who had been bundled away at a strange in-between hour in the morning where no questions had been answered and all the HYDRA agents wore masks to keep them from the gas being filtered into the room to knock them out.
Looking at Stevie now through the bulletproof one way mirror Bucky felt horrified - like he was in some mad nightmare that he needs to wake up from but can't.
Stevie was sat on a cold metal chair and all the lights in the room were pointed at him as if it was the set up for a morbid stage. But he could barely recognise his face, as beat up and bloodied as he was and his metal leg that he hated so much was the only true thing Bucky truly recognised from those 42 hours ago. There was a mesmerising steady drip of blood drip drip dripping down off Stevie's fingers onto the ground from deep lacerations on his arms that seemed to be singed at the edges.
It looked like they had rolled him over with a car then sliced him up just for the fun of it. Weren't he and Stevie meant to be training together? What happened to that?
I'm with him till the end of the line.
"I think I'm going to throw up"
Bucky turned quickly away from the distressing image of Stevie sat so close yet so far from him and retched up bile into the corner of the room. He had stayed strong for Stevie but seeing him like this, not even knowing if he's alive or dead? Too much, far too much for Bucky at this time.
"Barnes don't tell me all we had to do was kill your boytoy and you would break?" a mocking voice that he had got to know too well drifted through a speaker he didn't even notice was there through the utter horror of seeing his Stevie like this. "My how the mighty have fallen. Rogers is dead, Barnes. Won't you comply now?"
They wheeled Rogers in with as much urgency as a man who has the super serum flowing through his blood warrants when given even the maximum dosage of tranquilizers. They have thee HYDRA agents and the doctors already knew they had to get him in the cell and locked down tight before he becomes lucid because never let it be said that they don't learn quickly after making mistakes. The first time they were too timid in their dosage for Rogers, scared they might kill him before was necessary and he had woken half way through the short trip from cell to the doctors experimentation room and yet he still woke up, groggy and pissed off.
He started yelling that he wanted Bucky and pushing himself out of the restraints, straining desperately to try and escape back to the one living remnant from Brooklyn and his only ally in this hell.
The HYDRA agents, tiring of the timidity of the doctors told them to increase the dosage next time and simply shot him in his thigh and calf. It took a month to heal, but it also took the doctors a month to come up with a high enough dosage for Rogers.
And so he was trapped again inside his own body as HYDRA meticulously took it apart.
They were all interested in "the perfect soldier" who had the real super soldier serum thrum ing inside his veins, rather than Bucky, their old experiment, who they thought had failed and died on one of their many metal tables, impersonal and forgotten.
And they tried so very hard to break him - he knew he was barely hanging on to the last threads of his mind. They tried a wide array of methods so far and Steve felt as if his skin had been stripped back and scrubbed with acid as he sat in the cold metal chair. He knew without opening his eyes (which were both swollen shut and one was stuck together by a mixture of blood and tears) that his body looked worse than it truly was. And though he would be stiff and slowly healing for maybe two months after he would probably survive - be it with minimal scarring from the knives they used to slice him up and the acid they used to burn off his skin at the hip.
The worst scarring he knew would be his mind.
Whilst Steve was retreating in his mind he didn't even realise that the cell door was unlocked, nor that someone had walked in until he heard the agents voice slip out, all cold and hard edges that was thinly veiling heavy satisfaction.
"Barnes don't tell me all we had to do was kill your boytoy and you would break?"
The faint whine of the intercom was attacking his head and he barely had time to process that Bucky (his Bucky! Steve thought deliriously) was on the other side of the glass
"My how the mighty have fallen. Rogers is dead, Barnes. Won't you comply now?"
A gunshot rang out and Steve's vision faded into stinging hot pain and then... Nothing.