![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
domarzioneAfter the rescue of the 107th, Steve Rogers cashes in all of his favors and makes what deals he can to get Bucky a medical discharge from the Army, sending him home to Brooklyn and far from enemies and curious scientists both. But Steve’s war goes on until it ends badly, in an exploding plane over the Black Sea. Captain America is presumed dead, his shield recovered and returned to a grieving America while his body remains undiscovered.
Seven years later, a new danger is threatening to unbalance the already-roiling Cold War: a Soviet assassin let loose from behind the Iron Curtain. Peggy Carter isn’t sure she wants to believe that the assassin is a super-soldier because of what it could mean, but she does know that whoever it is, she’ll have to break her promise to keep Bucky Barnes far from danger.
Preserved
10K words chapter/17K total | PG-13-ish | Bucky Barnes, Peggy Carter
Bucky heard Judy's protest at the deeply unfair ritual of daily bathing coming from the upstairs bathroom when he got back, but that it was coming from the bathroom and not, say, the hallway or the kitchen or, in one memorable instance, the backyard meant that Molly had the situation well in hand. So he went from the kitchen, putting the milk in the refrigerator, to the living room without interfering. Judy would grow out of her refusal to do anything not on her own terms, his mother had assured him, to which his sister had chimed in that she was sure Sarah Rogers had been told the same thing. His mother had replied that there were worse examples to follow and Bucky already had a good handle on how to deal with that.
He had, right up until he hadn't, of course, and that breaking point had cost them both so very much. Was still costing them a decade later. And he'd just paid some more because someone, somewhere might figure out that his kids might have more in common with Steve Rogers than stubbornness. He'd been watching, afraid and hopeful both, but he'd seen nothing and, more importantly, neither had anyone else. As far as their pediatrician knew, the Barnes children were simply healthy kids blessed with having healthy parents. Maybe that's all it really was, maybe they'd gotten nothing from what had been done to him and just what they should have gotten anyway. He could wonder, but he couldn't take the chance that anyone else would. Which was why Peggy Carter had gotten what she'd come for.
He'd been standing the middle of the room, halfway to his chair, but he found himself walking to the bookcase with the photo albums instead. The blue-gray one, older than the others, and least touched because it was not their wedding album or the pictures of the kids. It had been Steve's, one of two that had come to the Barneses in the boxes with Steve's personal effects after he'd been declared dead in '48. The other, photos of Steve's people Steve'd only partially been able to identify, had gone into the same trunk as the trove of Barnes family photos. But this one covered Steve's own life, pictures of Steve from babyhood through his war years, and it had been brought up to Woodside by his parents and given to Molly, since they'd known Bucky would have objected. And Molly had promptly put it with the others and dared him to do anything about it, knowing that he wouldn't.
The first photos were labeled in Sarah Rogers's neat hand, Steve as a baby, at his baptism, in short pants holding a hobby horse, looking duly solemn holding schoolbooks. And then Bucky entered the picture, literally, a photo his father had taken of the two of them sitting on a stoop with Steve holding a stickball bat and Bucky with his arm casually around Steve's shoulders; this one had his mother's more flowery hand with the date and place. The rest of the photos were mixed between Steve's school pictures and casual photos through Steve's growth from tow-headed child to manhood. The pace of the photos slowed down as the Thirties drew to a close -- fewer milestones, but also fewer moments ready for the camera. Mrs. Rogers had been sent to the TB hospital in Staten Island, Steve had been working two jobs to go to art school and still keep a roof over his head, and Bucky had been waitering in Manhattan to avoid ending up on the railroad like his old man. The photos from those years tended to be the two of them looking weary and a little surprised, whether by whichever Barnes sibling had been wielding the camera or at how hard adulthood was turning out to be, Bucky couldn't guess. His memories of these captured moments were colored by what came after.
The last pages were full of promotional photos of Captain America, collected by his mother after she'd found out, along with a couple of photos of Steve out of costume from his time with the USO, taken by one of the showgirls most likely. There was a picture in the Barnes family kitchen of Steve lifting up Bucky's little brother Charlie, both of them laughing because Charlie had been taller and broader than Steve since he'd been fourteen, at least until Steve's "belated growth spurt," as his mother had dryly referred to it on the Cap pictures. There were two pictures of Bucky with Steve. One was from Steve's last visit back to New York before he died, in '45, and they were both smiling for the camera, but Bucky could see the strain between them. The second picture had been taken earlier, but it was later in the album because it had been one found in Steve's effects in London after he'd died; it was from '43, right after they'd gotten back to camp after the rescue of the 107th. They were both oriented toward the camera, but Steve was looking at him with such anguish and such relief that it was painful to see, even now. As for himself, he wasn't really looking at anything, or at least not seeing anything; he looked lost and exhausted and like he'd just walked out of a POW camp. He was filthy and cut and bruised and wearing the tatters of what had been someone else's uniform and his parents had both wept when they'd picked it up off the floor after it had fallen out of one of Steve's sketchbooks. Bucky understood why Steve had kept the photo -- a reminder of why he'd done what he'd done -- but he was also relieved that he hadn't seen it for the first time until years later.
The protests had ceased upstairs -- Judy having gotten over both having to bathe and doing so with her brother -- and now there was singing punctuated by the occasional yowl for a contested toy. It was a normal evening, the disruption caused by their visitor over and soon to be forgotten. Except not entirely, not for him.
The thought of going through more tests didn't appeal, but he didn't think it frightened him, not anymore. What the Nazis had done to him... it was over, it had been over for almost a decade. He wasn't the shell-shocked man in the picture anymore. There was a new war on to fix the public's eye and if he still dreamed about his own every once in a while, so did every other guy who'd come back. The tests weren't going to tell him -- or the SSR, whatever they were calling themselves now -- anything new. He hadn't noticed any changes, hadn't sprouted wings or started seeing through walls. And the giggles and stampeding feet from the bathroom -- Matty making his nightly post-bath run to his room in diaper-less freedom -- was proof that his biggest fear, that he wouldn't be able to father children, had been unfounded. He didn't know what the SSR was going to ask of him, but he could get through it. He had three -- soon to be four -- reasons upstairs to do so. Marriage and then fatherhood had not only reshaped his priorities, but they'd also reshaped his fears. He wasn't afraid for himself anymore because he didn't live for himself anymore.
"Daddy!" Judy hollered from the top of the stairwell. "Daddy, will you read with me?"
He closed Steve's album, putting the past away in favor of the future.
Getting the kids to bed was a two-person job these days, but the adults won in the end. Molly looked worn; she handled her pregnancies well enough that his sisters were jealous, but it had been a long day. He offered to make her tea so she didn't have to go back downstairs and she looked like she was torn between accepting and something else.
"This isn't you hoping I'll fall asleep before we talk, is it?"
He didn't want to talk, but he assured her that this was his attempt at being a doting husband and she accepted. She was settled on the bed when he returned with the tea and he sat down at the end on her side and took the hint to rub her feet when she poked at his thigh with her toe. Normally he enjoyed the quiet time he got to spend with her after the kids were in bed and likely to stay there; it was peaceful and unhurried and nothing at all like their pre-kids life. But the weight of what they'd have to discuss bore down on him, squeezing the edges of the calm.
"What did Peggy want?" Molly finally asked, setting the teacup on the nightstand and wiggling her toes in his hands.
He didn't look up from what he was doing. "Me."
He heard more than saw her rearrange the fold of the sheets by her hand. Watching and waiting.
"Does this have to do with what happened to you during the war?" she asked and he did look up then, surprised.
"Don't look all shocked," Molly chided. "I've been sleeping next to you for six years. I know what wakes you up in the night."
He'd never talked to her about his war; she'd known he'd been in Africa and then in Italy and that he'd gotten captured and that Steve had stormed the camp to free him, all of that was public knowledge and some of it American lore. But he'd never spoken about the rest, not to anyone, not even Steve.
"You don't," he said quietly, squeezing her foot. "You really don't."
He'd have been happy to keep this from her forever, spare her this pain because this would hurt her more than it would him at this point, but fate and Peggy Carter had decided otherwise. He met her eyes and let her see what she wanted to see in his.
She gestured with a tilt of her head for him to join her on the bed at her side. He took her hand once he had, interlacing their fingers. He wanted the connection, but couldn't do this and look at her, so he closed his eyes.
"The prison camp was a factory, mostly," he began. "But it was also where Schmidt and Zola, the head of HYDRA and his chief scientist, had labs. We didn't know it at the time, but they were trying to reproduce the super-soldier serum. They knew about Steve and Schmidt wanted to do God knows what, make himself an army or whatever it was. So the two of them, Schmidt and Zola, were brewing up cocktails of what they thought Erskine had used and then trying it out on prisoners, seeing what happened. Seeing who survived."
He heard her inhale sharply in realization and felt her squeeze his hand and he squeezed back.
"I didn't get taken until near the end," he went on, feeling tears well behind his eyelids because everything was coming back now. All of it, even things he'd never remembered once in the years since. He could smell the bitter tang of the chemicals and hear Zola's voice by his ear and he felt bile rising and swallowed it back down. "I'd had a cold when we'd gotten captured and it turned into pneumonia and they kept me apart from the others until I either got better or I died. I got better, but instead of putting me back on the line, they brought me to Zola so he could experiment on me."
His voice had broken on the last words, the first time he'd ever said them aloud. He took a deep breath and let it out, then another. Molly pulled their joined hands up to her lips and kissed his and he turned to her, a smile that had nothing to do with happiness on his face.
"I don't know how long I was with Zola," he said once he could get the words out okay. "I was out of my mind for most of it and wishing I was dead the rest. I knew I would die; nobody came back from Zola's lab. Nobody. Zola just kept using each man up until whatever he tried next killed them. I knew what was going to happen. I just didn't want to die screaming like some of the others did."
He squeezed her hand in his and used the other to wipe away tears. He could still hear the screaming, could still hear himself screaming; it was usually what woke him up from his nightmares when he dreamed about the war.
"I wasn't in a prison cell when Steve found me, like it says in the story," he continued. "I was strapped down in Zola's lab, out of my head with the drugs. If Steve hadn't seen where Zola had come from, if he hadn't been curious about what Zola might've left behind, I'd have died there when the place blew. Nobody knew where I was, nobody thought I was still alive."
He shook his head, one more tiny miracle on a day with so many. Steve had been trailing them like comets that day, everything about him full of magic and improbable success.
"I thought Steve was a fever dream, the angel of death or something," he chuckled, bemused even now. He'd heard the explosions, but had still been floating on whatever Zola had given him and he'd been barely lucid enough to be impressed with how peacefully he was taking his imminent death. "He was supposed to be in DC drawing propaganda posters, not in a HYDRA base looking like, well, Captain America. There was a lot there that looked like a fever dream."
He shuddered at the memory of Schmidt pulling off his face to reveal the red skull beneath.
"Once we got out of the camp, we still had to get back down to Allied lines," he said as he turned Molly's hand over in his, rubbing her thumb with his own, the gesture soothing to him. "I wasn't in any shape to march the first day, but by the second, I didn't have to be littered anymore. By the third, I was keeping up just fine. We got back to Steve's camp on the eighth day. It didn't take the SSR people too long to realize that I was 'special' and why. It didn't take Steve any time to realize what that would mean.
"Steve didn't sell himself to the SSR to get me away from the fighting. Or not just. He did it to get me away from the SSR."
He held up their hands so he could display the inside of his wrist and the light blue veins that were visible there, if not the blood that flowed through them. "Peggy Carter was here to tell me that she -- they -- weren't going to honor the deal anymore. They've remembered what they promised Steve they'd forget. They want to see what Zola did to me. What he turned me into."
Peggy had phrased it more nicely, but that's what she'd meant. In order to understand The American, they wanted to study the monster they already had on a leash. See if he was capable of turning a man's head clean around, but whether she meant if he could or he would, well, that was a distinction that might not have a difference. And if they decided no, he'd be powerless to change their minds.
Molly turned their hands back over so his was on top and his wedding ring reflected the light from her nightstand. He hadn't wanted one because he didn't wear jewelry; his father didn't wear one, nor did many of friends and colleagues, but Molly had felt strongly about it and he'd relented. Molly'd been right, as usual, and every time he saw it, even out of the corner of his eye while waving his cap to signal all clear to close the train doors at the station stop, it made him think of her. He looked up at her now and she cocked an eyebrow to tell him she knew what she'd done.
"Zola didn't turn you into anything," she told him firmly. "Whatever else he did to you, and I want to kill him slowly for it, that was beyond his power. He changed you, but only into someone who'd felt pain beyond what any good man should endure. And a good man is what you are, James Buchanan Barnes, no more and no less, and I am in a position to judge."
He smiled at her, genuine and, he hoped, full of love. "Thank you," he said, even though they both knew that wouldn't be enough if the government came calling.
"What did you tell Peggy, then?" Molly prompted as the companionable silence stretched. They could hear a car drive past, someone from not around here because they would have known to slow down before hitting the pothole in front of the Flannery house; Bucky winced more at the sound of the suspension recovering than the question.
"I told her she was going to have to make me the same deal she made Steve," he answered, looking down at his free hand in his lap. "I'll do what she wants in exchange for a promise to forget."
He waited for Molly to realize what he'd done. He didn't think she'd be angry with him, not for trying to protect their children. He hoped she wouldn't be angry at him later on, though, once she realized that he'd put them in danger in the first place.
Molly untangled her fingers from his and he held his breath for a second, wondering if she'd already gotten to that point. But then she sighed and brought her now-free hand to his cheek, turning his face to look at her. "You're a fool and it's a good thing I already knew that because we've been married too long for me to be able to return you for a cleverer model," she said softly, pulling him in for a gentle kiss. "Did you lock up downstairs?"
By the time he took care of the locking-up and checking in on the kids (Matty could scream like an air-raid siren if his toy lion had fallen out of his crib during the night) and his own care, Molly had turned off her lamp and gotten herself settled into the pillow fortress she built every night to support her stomach. He wasn't sure if she was asleep, but he moved around quietly just in case. He wasn't sure he'd be able to sleep and if he did, whether it would be without nightmares, but he had to put in a good faith effort; he was on the Ronkonkoma run early tomorrow.
"D'ye think you'll forgive Steve now?" Molly asked softly in the dark.
"Maybe," he answered. Which was as good as a yes as far as Steve ever went, but he wasn't ready to concede it just yet.
"Did you bring Steve here the first time, too?" Bucky asked as Peggy drove them through the gates of Camp Lehigh, past the better-armed-than-MPs guards and along a tree-lined road. The Army had pulled up stakes but not formally decommissioned the place, simply choosing not to turn it into Fort Lehigh and letting the SSR -- SHIELD -- rent it out for a fee.
It wasn't meant as irony that they were testing him here, where Steve had been selected for Project Rebirth and where, after he'd been transformed, they'd brought him for his own testing. It was simply expedient.
"Not the first time, no," Peggy answered, speeding up past the first curve and honking for some pedestrians to get out of the way. The SHIELD agents here wore a uniform that looked like regular Army fatigues until you saw the patches; Peggy had already explained that the Army had let SHIELD buy them for cheap because they were issuing new gear to the guys in Korea.
They drove past a pack of trainees running in formation with rucks on their back, making it seem even more like a regular Army base; no wonder the locals weren't the least bit suspicious. Bucky tried to find comfort in that little bit of familiar-if-he-didn't-squint; he'd been fine when he'd left the house, but he was feeling more than a little apprehensive now that they were here. He'd been told nothing about what was going to happen, just that it would take all day and to not eat anything after dinner the night before.
"Nobody knows who you really are," Peggy said as she pulled in sharply to the lot attached to a pre-fab building. "The name on the file is James, no indication whether it is a first or last name."
She stopped the car and stepped out and he followed her into the building, which turned out to be kind of false facade, just a set of security checkpoints before an elevator took them underground. The hallways here were wide and well-lit, but the place still felt like a hospital, especially with the white-coated men rushing to and fro and the stink of chemicals and cleaner underneath the fug of cigarette smoke. It was a lot like the HYDRA base, except the signs were in English and there wasn't the overwhelming stink of unwashed prisoners and human waste. He swallowed hard and followed Peggy's purposeful stride down the hall.
He'd admitted to Molly that he didn't really remember the first round of testing in '43. He knew it'd been in DC and he remembered that he'd flown directly from Italy without getting to go to New York first, that before he'd left Italy he'd had a fight with Steve that would have escalated to violence had Steve not used their strength disparity to hold him still. But there was a gap that covered the time from the plane ride to when he had already arrived in Brooklyn. His first memories of being back on US soil were of sitting in his mother's kitchen eating an apple dumpling. He didn't know if it was because he'd just shut down in DC or because he'd been a little hazy around that time in general, but he suspected the former because the rest of that time was pretty clear. How bad it had actually been, he didn't know, but clearly it had been too much. He could only pray that this time, it either wasn't so bad or he could forget it as completely. Maybe they could make him forget.
There was a staircase on the other side of the door they passed through that led down to what looked like the garage where he brought his car for repairs, except that the equipment was smaller in scale -- for human bodies, not autos. Peggy paused on the steps, looking for someone, giving him a chance to catch up and look around. There was a giant tube in the corner, mounted on metal arms, that looked like something out of the old horror shorts, a vampire coffin for a modern kind of vampire, maybe. It's not like there was any daylight down here.
Peggy found who she was looking for and started walking again, turning left at the foot of the stairs and wending her way around the tables and the men focused on their test tubes and microscopes. Her target turned out to be a fellow in his fifties, maybe, gray hair and glasses and a smile for Peggy that was just short of being a little too appreciative of how she filled out her suit. Bucky couldn't see how Peggy reacted, but he didn't bother to hide that he didn't care for it when the man's attention turned to him. He might not be happy with Peggy coming into his life like a wrecking ball, but she was still Steve's girl. Not that she needed his help; when she spoke to Doctor Wakefield, her voice was frosty enough for even the biggest idiot to notice and Wakefield, it turned out, was no idiot. He was the head honcho around here, which didn't mean he wasn't an idiot, but he stopped treating Peggy like a cigarette girl. Bucky, on the other hand, was still a lab specimen.
Wakefield called over a black guy named Wendell and told him to take Bucky off to get changed and take his vitals and get him fed, what sounded like the basic stuff you'd tell a nurse or an orderly to do. Except that once Bucky -- after a quick look over at Peggy, who nodded -- had been led out of the garage-like main floor and into a side room that looked more like what passed for a doctor's office in the Army, it turned out Wendell the orderly was actually Doctor Clarence Wendell, MD-PhD.
"Seems like overkill," Bucky responded as he changed behind a leather curtain into what was definitely surplus Army PT gear. The curtain was really to shield the doctor during some test and Wendell had told him he'd be getting undressed in front of other people later, but it was an offer of the dignity of privacy on a day when there wasn't going to be any and Bucky appreciated the gesture. "Of course, I never finished college in the first place."
He'd been good enough in high school to be a day student at Brooklyn College and he'd gone for two years, but he had quit after that and gone to work instead. The first year, everyone had been so enthusiastic on Bucky's behalf -- the first Barnes to go to college! -- that it hadn't seemed so bad, but the enthusiasm of others couldn't carry him forever. The classes weren't too hard, just everything else. His parents were still supporting four kids with him in school during the day and he wasn't sure anymore what college would get him for a career. He'd had no designs on being a doctor or a lawyer, didn't want to be a teacher, and didn't have the connections to move into business. His parents had been vehement that his decision shouldn't be based on their finances and they'd been a little disappointed because they'd had dreams of him being a doctor, but it had been his sister Dottie who'd been the first Barnes to graduate college and he'd been glad for her with no regrets.
"My parents thought I might've been avoiding the 'getting to work' part of the show," Wendell admitted as Bucky emerged from behind the curtain with his clothes in his hands. Wendell gestured toward a set of hooks hanging on the wall and Bucky went over to hang them. "But it got me here, so it was just the right amount of kill."
Bucky thought back to Wakefield snapping his fingers to summon Wendell like a porter and hoped it was as worth it as Wendell seemed to think.
The exam that Wendell performed was quick and nothing that a regular doctor wouldn't have done and Wendell didn't seem either impressed or surprised by the results until he whacked Bucky on the knee with the hammer and hadn't been prepared for the reaction time or strength.
"Hunh," he chuffed out. "You got good reflexes all over?"
Bucky gave him a weak smile. "Kinda why I'm here."
Wendell raised his eyebrows because yeah, he knew that. "Knowing it and seeing it's a different story," he said. "Especially in person. I've seen the footage of Steve Rogers's tests, but that's almost like a movie, you know? Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd did the same kind of stuff on film, too, and there's not much difference watching it on the screen."
It hurt to hear Steve spoken about like a stranger, like a fictional character, and Bucky bit his lip to keep from saying that Steve had been a friend and that seeing that friend suddenly appear twice as large as life and just in the nick of time had been both everything and nothing like a movie.
"You have Rogers's tests?" he asked instead. He wondered what Steve had looked like during the test, whether he'd been amazed at his own changes or terrified by the camera as he'd always been until the USO had apparently knocked it out of him. The pictures of Steve in the album at home were sometimes laughable in their stiffness; Steve had done okay when caught unawares, but if you'd told him to pose he'd look all wide-eyed and freeze and the result was that he'd look like an escaped prisoner who'd just heard a police siren. Or else his eyes would be closed. The only exceptions had been when he'd been a little drunk or too tired to react quick enough; it was just as well that he'd learned how to pose because Captain America hadn't been able to get drunk and it would've taken much more than exhaustion to dull his reactions.
"They're really not all that interesting," Wendell replied, going back to the table in the corner and doing something with his back to Bucky. "He was just doing the same things you're going to be doing. We're going to be filming you, too."
Bucky might've said something about that, but then Wendell turned around with a tray with syringes on them and then Bucky couldn't say a word. He hadn't been near a syringe since '43, let alone so many. He inhaled loudly through his nose and let it out just as noisily, settling himself. He'd known this was coming, had been expecting it, and he'd thought himself prepared. But apparently not, or maybe not without some warning.
"Not a fan of needles?" Wendell asked with a smile, amused. "These aren't so bad; they're just to draw blood. The ones they're gonna use later are gonna be much bigger. Sorry."
Wendell was still smiling a little as he reached out to tourniquet Bucky's arm and Bucky wondered who Wendell thought he was if he was making jokes about needles. Wendell could be an asshole who just enjoyed watching someone else's misery, but those kinds of assholes wouldn't have turned their backs as Bucky changed behind a curtain.
The stick of the needle was a split-second of pure horror, but then it was over and Bucky could watch the rest of the blood draw with a dispassionate lack of concern. At least until the third vial was filled and he had to ask just how much more was going to be required.
"You never met a Negro vampire?" Wendell asked cheerfully, then sobered a little. "This is the last one."
The next bit of fluid collection earned Bucky an entirely different kind of smile from Wendell as he explained what was required.
"You're kidding," he said flatly as Wendell handed him a small sample cup. "Come on."
"What, you want a bigger cup?" Wendell knew very well this time that Bucky was uncomfortable and his amusement was because of it, not in spite of it or in ignorance of it. "I'll wait outside."
It wasn't the principle of the thing, either the act or its necessity -- church-going Catholic or not, Molly's willingness waned during her pregnancies while his urges did not and this might be the only way to find out if anything had been passed on to their children. But the circumstances were going to make it difficult -- he'd stroked one off in odd or dangerous places before, but not since he'd come back from the war and not since the smell of chemicals and antiseptic and iodine started making his heart beat faster for all the wrong reasons.
It felt like it took forever to tune out the world enough to even think of touching himself, but when he opened the door afterward, Wendell didn't make a joke and just took the cup for labeling.
The next stop was X-rays, where Wendell asked if Bucky had kids while he positioned the lead blanket. Bucky nearly answered "two, one more on the way" before remembering where he was and why and what Peggy had promised him and so he said no, not yet. "Well, then you'd best keep that blanket in place in case you change your mind," Wendell warned him before going to disappear behind his own protection.
The jokes were about glowing in the dark as they moved on to the next stop, which was a break room with coffee and ham-and-cheese sandwiches and grapes. "We needed you to fast for the blood draw, but now you'll need your strength back," Wendell told him as he pulled out a cigarette case. There was another man sitting at a small table in the corner reading as he stirred something in a bowl, ignoring them completely. Wendell let him eat, enjoying his own cigarette, but carried what conversation there was. He didn't ask Bucky about his past or his present, keeping to neutral topics like baseball. Which wasn't all that neutral once Wendell admitted to becoming a bit of a Giants fan since moving to New Jersey -- "hey, Ernie Harwell's who comes in on the radio down here!" -- but they could talk about Kiner and Minoso and how much more tolerable Allie Reynolds would be if he weren't pitching for the Yankees.
After a pair of sandwiches and a handful of grapes washed down with coffee, Bucky was led on to the next station, which was a dimly lit room with machines to test his vision and hearing. He had very good of both, but he didn't think he was very special there, or at least that what had been done to him made much of a difference -- those senses had made him a good soldier before his capture. But he had no way of knowing because the people who tested him didn't say a word to him that they didn't have to and didn't react at all to the results.
"Now's when you get to make like a performing monkey," Wendell told him apologetically after he came in to retrieve Bucky. "It's probably the most important part, though."
The hall they entered looked like one of the lecture rooms from his college days with a stage up front with blackboards and stadium seating at the other end with desks and chairs on the different levels. The seating was mostly occupied and Bucky saw Peggy among the audience and felt relieved and then was surprised by that. She gave him a nod that made him feel a little less like the tiger at the zoo, at least until Wakefield took custody of him from Wendell, who disappeared into the crowd, and ordered him to stand in front of the blank white space on the front wall between the blackboards.
What followed then was almost relaxing in as Bucky was ordered to take off his shirt and stand barefoot in the PT shorts and turn and hold position for the movie camera like a model for a magazine or a prisoner for a police lineup. He was told to jump and stretch and then measured like a prize fighter and weighed again, even though Wendell had had him step on a scale and he'd eaten an hour earlier. It was strange and a little uncomfortable to be on display, but it was also nothing like Zola's lab, just impersonal without being completely dehumanizing. Kind of like basic training had been and if Bucky closed his eyes, he could almost imagine it was back then, full of petty humiliations and nonsensical orders that had an actual purpose he couldn't divine. He'd signed up for more than he'd bargained for then, too.
The feeling of deja vu from Basic continued once they moved from modeling to dodging projectiles -- rubber pellets fired from a special gun; they moved much slower than bullets but still hurt the couple of times they were aimed center-mass and he'd not been able to avoid them completely. There were no apologies when that happened, which certainly was like Basic had been. From dodging to catching, this time tennis balls from a machine that fired them like mortars and Bucky's palms got numb but he was able to lose himself in the activity, forgetting where he was and why in favor of concentrating on catching each one. It was a little like playing catch with Judy and her pink ball; her enthusiasm outstripped her aim by a healthy margin, although the balls came at him now with a bit more pepper than she was able to put on them. They didn't seem that fast, though, and he was able to catch all of them without breaking a sweat, but when the machine stopped and he looked up and once again saw the faces of the observers and they all looked a little stunned. Even Peggy, which made no sense because she'd seen Steve do all sorts of things with his super-skills. It was uncomfortable and he turned away from them, going over to where a glass of water had been placed for him and draining it.
When he went back on the stage, Wakefield ordered him over to where a cord-and-pulley weight lift was set up, like you'd see at the arcade down at Coney Island for the strongmen just without the rainbow colors and Wakefield's assistants weren't as leggy, female, or saucily dressed. The only weightlifting Bucky ever did was picking up his kids and applying brute force to broken train doors at work, but he didn't think he embarrassed himself too badly. The circus theme continued through the end of the strength and reflex tests until Wakefield finally had enough and barked out something to his assistants and walked off, the audience stirring to action as he disappeared. Bucky was left waiting on stage, so he put on his shirt and stood there until someone approached him. It wasn't Wendell this time, but a middle-aged man with a limp and, when he opened his mouth, a Polish accent.
Doctor Greenbaum was a psychiatrist who specialized in cognitive development and explained to him as they walked to yet another room that he would be testing Bucky's memory and analytical skills, how quickly he processed data and how well he retained it.
"I hope you aren't going to be measuring me up to Rogers," Bucky said as they walked down the hallway. "The serum didn't do anything to his memory."
Steve had always had the memory of an elephant, which had sometimes been great and sometimes been terrible. What had changed by the time Bucky met him as Captain America had been his ability to focus. Steve had been a daydreamer, which hadn't helped either in school or in the schoolyard. He'd concentrate on his art, but everything else he could easily get distracted from. But Captain America had been another story and Bucky honestly didn't know if the serum had done that or simply the war. Not all of the changes in Steve had come out of Erskine's bottles.
Greenbaum gave him a measuring look and Bucky belated realized that he shouldn't have given any indication that he'd known Steve and hoped that that had been a detail that had been in the stuff they'd written about him after the plane had gone down. He needed to be more careful, more mindful. These were all very smart people and not one of them was his friend or even his ally, not even Wendell; they were all interested in him for less-than-good reasons and were being held in check by a flimsy agreement they hadn't signed on to. Greenbaum had been friendly toward him after he'd been treated like a circus monkey and he couldn't respond to that as he had. He'd been away from the battlefield for a long time, but he needed to be back on it now. These people weren't his captors, but they were more dangerous in many ways.
Greenbaum's room was somehow spare and cluttered at the same time, bookcases around the walls crammed messily with papers and books but his desk and the table to which he led Bucky were clean and organized. The memory tests weren't what he'd thought they'd be -- like the card game, turning over matches -- but instead required him to look at a series of pictures for a few seconds and then answers questions about them, then the process was repeated with lists of numbers and then paragraphs of text. Bucky had never had Steve's gift of perfect recall, but he'd been working for the railroad for almost eight years and, like every other conductor worth his salt, he could look over a picture -- or a car full of passengers -- and remember the important details, same with skimming lists of numbers or train schedules. He cruised through the memory tests. His work skills helped him out with the computational and analytical tests as well. If he could give correct change for an on-board ticket purchase without missing a beat and re-work the schedule in his head to know if they were going to have to ask for the connecting train at Valley Stream to be held up for them while a dozen passengers griped at him for the delay, then sitting in a quiet office adding sums and figuring out which one of Alice, Bob, Carol, or Don had bought the red apple or the green apple wasn't going to be difficult. He couldn't tell if Greenbaum was pleased or disappointed that he wasn't more flustered by the problems placed before him.
It was Peggy who came to collect him from Greenbaum. "How are you holding up?" she asked as they walked back the way they'd came, to the elevator. Her tone was professional more than compassionate, but there was enough humanity to let him know that she wasn't asking for form's sake.
"I think the worst is yet to come," he answered honestly.
She gave him a smile that was almost kind as they waited for the elevator doors to open. "You're doing much better than last time, if that's any comfort."
He looked at her sharply. Had she been there? He didn't remember her being there, which, granted, he didn't remember anything, but that seemed like something he would recall. "I don't think I could do worse."
She smirked agreement, but gave him nothing more, pulling open the elevator door and gesturing for him to precede her. Her own version of politeness or a none-too-subtle means of reinforcing that he was the damsel in distress and she was the hero this time, he didn't know.
Upstairs and outside and a jeep was waiting to take them across the camp to a running track, where Bucky did timed sprints and then ran for distance, getting his heart rate checked before and after each time. Then to a shooting range. He'd been an expert shot before his capture with both a pistol and a rifle and he'd been a sniper in Africa, but in theory none of them knew any of that. He'd shot since the war; Charlie was a cop now and once in a while would get Bucky to come to the range for a little sibling rivalry shootout. (Bucky beat him on points every time and he didn't know why Charlie kept it up; their mother said it was a way to build a relationship with the big brother who'd gone to war just when the age difference would have stopped mattering so much and had come home a stranger.) His first few shots weren't what he'd have liked, but then he got the feel and the rest were good. Shooting was relaxing, it always had been. He'd been surprised when he'd first held a gun, how natural and easy it was, but now it was something he took as expected, to fall into the rhythm and see the proper results. He didn't know if this had been planned as a kind of break for him or if it was just coincidence, but he felt calmer as they drove back to the underground bunker and whatever came next after Peggy handed him back over to another someone in a long white coat who didn't bother introducing himself.
It didn't take long for that calm to disappear, however, once they were back down the elevator. He was told to shower and given only a pair of Army issue shorts and a pair of socks to put back on once he was cleaned off, then he was led to what looked like an operating room.
He froze at the doorway, looking around at the machines and the equipment and the steel bed with the restraining straps dangling and the impatient, expectant faces of the doctors who just wanted what Zola and Schmidt had put inside of him. He couldn't breathe for a moment, then he could but not easily. He felt lightheaded and ready to vomit and he wanted to run all the way home to Woodside in his underwear. He wanted a pistol back in his hands, although whether to shoot himself or them, he couldn't have answered in that moment. He couldn't move, couldn't hear what was being said to him, couldn't feel the fingers of the hand pulling him forcefully into the room.
And then everything snapped back into place, his heart stopped hammering and his ears heard voices and he could move his feet because he had to. This was what he'd agreed to, this was what kept these men from Judy and Matty and the baby he knew Molly was going to want to name Steven if it was a boy. This is what he now prayed to God he'd forget once it was over.
He got on the table, centered himself on the padding, and lay down on his side as commanded; his fingertips felt the grooves on the side of the table that were meant to catch the flowing blood. He concentrated on his breathing -- on breathing at all -- and alternated between closing his eyes to make it all go away and needing to see what was happening. Almost all of which was happening behind him, which didn't help his anxiety. He saw motion by his feet and it turned out to be Wendell, who was not smiling now, was looking a bit queasy, actually, and Bucky chuckled to himself because good, he wasn't the only one.
His shorts were cut away along his side, exposing his hip and his right butt cheek and he felt the coolness of an alcohol swab and then something else wiped over the area as well. Nobody was talking to him, he didn't know what anyone was doing but that might've been because he hadn't been able to listen when he'd been told, although he suspected a needle was going to be involved because they always cleaned before needles. Zola, who'd been otherwise oblivious to his subjects' filth and stench, would swab before jabbing in a syringe.
They warned him, at least, that he'd feel a prick of a needle. "It's an anesthetic," he was told. "It will numb the area so we can take the samples without discomfort to you."
"You know I need more than normal, right?" he said in what sounded like a surprisingly calm tone.
"Yes, Mister James," a voice said from behind him. "We are aware of your accelerated metabolism from your previous exam."
It sounded strange, hearing it like that. He knew that's what it was, but he never thought about it so... scientifically. He didn't get drunk easily and he didn't really gain weight, but that's as far as it went -- he got ribbed a little bit by the guys for eating all the time and not getting a gut. It was nothing too out of the ordinary, not with his skinny parents, and he didn't have to ignore it the way he had to pretend he didn't notice some of the other things.
The prick of the needle was more than a prick, but it was over quickly and he'd seen the needle approach from the corner of his eye. They left him be for a minute, probably so that whatever they shot him up with could take effect, and Bucky was ready to breathe deeply and try his best to endure the rest without embarrassing himself... until he saw the next needle. It was massive, a comic-book spike of a needle and it was coming at him from his front side, so he could watch it approach, held in the hand of a doctor who was carrying it like a dagger, and he couldn't think of his dignity as he watched, couldn't think of anything as the syringe came closer and without so much as a glance up at his face to see if he was ready, was jabbed in to his hip with enough force that it didn't stop when it hit bone.
He screamed then, in pain. In terror. He couldn't breathe, couldn't see with his eyes tearing up, and he heard himself screaming but it didn't feel like him because he felt nothing but fiery pain radiating through his body like a shockwave. Like it had in Zola's lab. He reached out to yank it free and felt hands holding him back, not enough force to stop him until it was and he was being pushed down against the table and he fought, fought like he hadn't been able to in Zola's lab. But the response was the same, more bodies holding him down, restraints being strapped over him, more needles pushing more drugs into his veins and it didn't matter, he was stronger than they were, stronger than the drugs, Zola had made him stronger than both. He looked around to see if Zola was watching, smug grin on the tiny bastard's face as he watched to see what his concoctions had wrought, but he couldn't see him, couldn't see anything familiar, and then there was something over his face and he saw nothing.
He wasn't out completely, he realized, just lax and loose and rubbery and he could still hear voices, angry and surprised and too fuzzy to make out. His German had always sucked anyway. It took effort to open his eyes but he did because the last time he'd felt like this, Steve had come for him. He felt his eyes burn with tears when he just saw a light fixture. He didn't know how long he'd been out, but he knew they were still working on him, doing whatever they wanted, and he couldn't make his limbs move enough to fight them. He moved enough to startle them, though, and he heard someone shout at someone else about why the hell was he still awake. He could feel a weight dragging him down to unconsciousness and all he could do, all he had time to do, was pray that he woke up.
He woke suddenly; he was alert when a moment before he hadn't been. He didn't open his eyes -- Zola's people left you alone, most of the time, if you were out but still breathing. He listened, hoping he could pick out something, as he cataloged his body: he could feel his feet, his legs, his hands, his arms, his back; he knew his head was still attached and only hoped his balls were, too -- Zola had taken those from some of his subjects. His right hip hurt, but nothing else, and he was thirsty but not dangerously so. He didn't hear anything, just a quiet hum he recognized as air flow and the ripple of paper, either moving on the breeze or a page being turned.
And then he heard a door open and then Johnnie Ray's voice singing in the distance and that didn't fit, Zola had only played Wagner and Strauss, and he knew all in a moment that this wasn't then, wasn't there. He wasn't in the HYDRA factory; he was in New Jersey.
There was the sound of something being put down and footsteps moving away and the door closing, leaving Johnnie Ray to walk his baby back home somewhere else.
He opened his eyes and saw the operating room, and breathed deeply, letting it out in a gust. A second later, Wendell was standing over him.
"Welcome back," Wendell said, watching him with concern.
"I'm not gonna hit you," Bucky got out, although it came out raspy and low and raw.
"Good to know," Wendell replied with a quick smile that disappeared as fast as it had come. He continued to look Bucky over with a professional eye. "Although I'm not sure I'd blame you if you did. How do you feel?"
Scared. Embarrassed. Angry. Exhausted. Vulnerable. "Been worse."
Wendell chuckled, but he didn't look amused. "I'm a lot less surprised by that answer than I would have been this morning," he said, taking a step back. "Can you sit up? Slowly, slowly."
He held out his hand for Bucky to use to steady himself, but Bucky didn't take it, just moving stiffly -- the dressing at his hip was well-padded. He didn't feel unsteady, or at least like he was about to topple over. He felt unsteady in every other way and arranged the blanket they'd covered him with around his waist and lap like it could protect him the way the X-ray blanket had.
Once he'd proven himself capable of sitting, Wendell went over to the sink and filled a glass of water, handing it over with the exhortation to drink slowly or it would all come right back up.
"I know I'm not supposed to ask," Wendell began once the empty glass was handed back over, "but... all they told us is that you were a test subject for one of the attempts to recreate Erskine's serum back in the Forties." He paused, hands moving restlessly over the glass's rim. "Did we do this to you?"
Bucky smiled. He was relieved that Wendell didn't know the answer, that nothing he'd done while he was out of his mind with fear and convinced he'd been back on Zola's table had given his identity away -- he hadn't rattled off his name, rank, and serial number or started begging in German for them to stop. Or maybe Wendell hadn't been there for it, but Bucky suspected that if anyone had left the room, they'd have been called back to hold him down.
"Can't say much for your bedside manner today," he said and Wendell had the good grace to look ashamed. He knew why Wendell was asking and was glad for it -- a little less glory of the science and a little more remembering that they were doing science on people couldn't hurt in a place like this. "But the SSR weren't the only ones trying."
It was all but an admission that he'd been a POW and not a volunteer, but he knew it wouldn't get Wendell any closer to figuring out who he was. The original file of Patient X, to which everything from today would be added, made it clear that he'd been a HYDRA test subject and if Wendell didn't know that now, he would eventually.
Wendell took a step back and clutched the glass more tightly.
"I'm sorry," he said, meeting Bucky's gaze. "I'm sorry for what they did and I'm sorry that we acted like it didn't matter. It's in your file, isn't it?"
Bucky shrugged. The important people knew and didn't care because it didn't matter except that it made sample collection more difficult. If it had mattered, he wouldn't be here.
"The people you work for have their priorities," he said, since "the people you work for are soulless bastards who'd do anything to get ahead in the game" was less useful, if more accurate.
He slid off the table and on to his feet, happy that his legs held him up without wobbling, once Wendell turned to put the glass down. He didn't want to talk about this anymore because he didn't want Wendell working up the courage to ask why he was here today.
There was a robe folded up on a tray table and Bucky went to it, shrugging it on and then letting both the blanket and the tattered underwear fall away underneath before belting it tightly. He left those on the tray table.
"They've canceled the rest of the tests for today," Wendell explained as gestured toward the door and they left the operating room. "Agent Carter'll take you home."
"I made enough of a scene?" Bucky asked, relieved to be finished but disappointed that this wasn't going to be the end of things.
"Nobody really kept track of how much we used to bring you down," Wendell said as they walked. Take me down, Bucky corrected in his head. "And we need to re-establish your metabolic rate because it's nothing like it was when you were last tested. What you were given should have worked and, clearly, it didn't. The next tests... they hurt, no getting around that. And if we can't minimize that pain, or knock you out entirely if that's best, then it's good to wait until we can. You shouldn't need to go through that again."
Wendell didn't follow him into the room where his clothes were still hanging on their pegs. He could see the starts of bruises on his arms and chest, long ones from the straps and the hands holding him down and small blotches where the needles had gone in. He'd probably best change for bed in the bathroom tonight; Molly was going to be on edge no matter what and seeing him like this wasn't going to be good for her with the baby so close.
He splashed water on his face before putting on his undershirt and made an effort to straighten his hair with wet fingers once he was dressed, but Peggy still nearly did a double-take when she came to collect him from the break room, where he was waiting by himself with a copy of yesterday's Times. She put on her best face, though, and gave him a brisk exhortation to get going so that they could avoid the traffic.
The ride back to Manhattan was quiet; Peggy drove and he looked out the window until they hit the tunnel.
"Do you want me to drive you all the way back?" Peggy asked.
The plan had been for her to drop him off at Penn Station and he'd take the train home from there; it was supposed to have been later and the rush hour traffic would have been murder.
"Do I look that bad?" he asked by way of reply.
Peggy made a point of looking him over, all without giving the impression that she'd forgotten about the road in front of them.
"No, but I'm sure Molly will think otherwise," she finally answered.
"Train'll still be faster," he said and so she swung south once they cleared the tunnel instead of heading north for the Queensboro Bridge.
"They'll want to complete the testing," she warned him as she double-parked on Eighth, ignoring the honking of the taxis she was obstructing. "I don't know when it will be, but I'll let you know when I do."
Bucky nodded, reaching for the door handle. He knew and he'd have to prepare himself for it, but right now, he needed to recover from today and pretend that next time didn't exist. He needed to see his family, see his kids to remind himself of why he'd agreed and why this was so important. He needed time for the bruises to fade, both the ones on his body and the ones on his soul. "But you got what you needed already, right?"
She made a face that could've meant anything. "I got answers," she said. "Some of them were for questions I had, some were for questions I didn't know I had. I have more. But, yes, this helped tremendously and I thank you for that."
He laughed, low and bitter, as he opened the door. "You don't have to thank people for doing what they had no choice but to do."
He closed the door gently, patting it twice, before turning to go toward the station entrance. He didn't look behind him.
Seven years later, a new danger is threatening to unbalance the already-roiling Cold War: a Soviet assassin let loose from behind the Iron Curtain. Peggy Carter isn’t sure she wants to believe that the assassin is a super-soldier because of what it could mean, but she does know that whoever it is, she’ll have to break her promise to keep Bucky Barnes far from danger.
Preserved
10K words chapter/17K total | PG-13-ish | Bucky Barnes, Peggy Carter
Bucky heard Judy's protest at the deeply unfair ritual of daily bathing coming from the upstairs bathroom when he got back, but that it was coming from the bathroom and not, say, the hallway or the kitchen or, in one memorable instance, the backyard meant that Molly had the situation well in hand. So he went from the kitchen, putting the milk in the refrigerator, to the living room without interfering. Judy would grow out of her refusal to do anything not on her own terms, his mother had assured him, to which his sister had chimed in that she was sure Sarah Rogers had been told the same thing. His mother had replied that there were worse examples to follow and Bucky already had a good handle on how to deal with that.
He had, right up until he hadn't, of course, and that breaking point had cost them both so very much. Was still costing them a decade later. And he'd just paid some more because someone, somewhere might figure out that his kids might have more in common with Steve Rogers than stubbornness. He'd been watching, afraid and hopeful both, but he'd seen nothing and, more importantly, neither had anyone else. As far as their pediatrician knew, the Barnes children were simply healthy kids blessed with having healthy parents. Maybe that's all it really was, maybe they'd gotten nothing from what had been done to him and just what they should have gotten anyway. He could wonder, but he couldn't take the chance that anyone else would. Which was why Peggy Carter had gotten what she'd come for.
He'd been standing the middle of the room, halfway to his chair, but he found himself walking to the bookcase with the photo albums instead. The blue-gray one, older than the others, and least touched because it was not their wedding album or the pictures of the kids. It had been Steve's, one of two that had come to the Barneses in the boxes with Steve's personal effects after he'd been declared dead in '48. The other, photos of Steve's people Steve'd only partially been able to identify, had gone into the same trunk as the trove of Barnes family photos. But this one covered Steve's own life, pictures of Steve from babyhood through his war years, and it had been brought up to Woodside by his parents and given to Molly, since they'd known Bucky would have objected. And Molly had promptly put it with the others and dared him to do anything about it, knowing that he wouldn't.
The first photos were labeled in Sarah Rogers's neat hand, Steve as a baby, at his baptism, in short pants holding a hobby horse, looking duly solemn holding schoolbooks. And then Bucky entered the picture, literally, a photo his father had taken of the two of them sitting on a stoop with Steve holding a stickball bat and Bucky with his arm casually around Steve's shoulders; this one had his mother's more flowery hand with the date and place. The rest of the photos were mixed between Steve's school pictures and casual photos through Steve's growth from tow-headed child to manhood. The pace of the photos slowed down as the Thirties drew to a close -- fewer milestones, but also fewer moments ready for the camera. Mrs. Rogers had been sent to the TB hospital in Staten Island, Steve had been working two jobs to go to art school and still keep a roof over his head, and Bucky had been waitering in Manhattan to avoid ending up on the railroad like his old man. The photos from those years tended to be the two of them looking weary and a little surprised, whether by whichever Barnes sibling had been wielding the camera or at how hard adulthood was turning out to be, Bucky couldn't guess. His memories of these captured moments were colored by what came after.
The last pages were full of promotional photos of Captain America, collected by his mother after she'd found out, along with a couple of photos of Steve out of costume from his time with the USO, taken by one of the showgirls most likely. There was a picture in the Barnes family kitchen of Steve lifting up Bucky's little brother Charlie, both of them laughing because Charlie had been taller and broader than Steve since he'd been fourteen, at least until Steve's "belated growth spurt," as his mother had dryly referred to it on the Cap pictures. There were two pictures of Bucky with Steve. One was from Steve's last visit back to New York before he died, in '45, and they were both smiling for the camera, but Bucky could see the strain between them. The second picture had been taken earlier, but it was later in the album because it had been one found in Steve's effects in London after he'd died; it was from '43, right after they'd gotten back to camp after the rescue of the 107th. They were both oriented toward the camera, but Steve was looking at him with such anguish and such relief that it was painful to see, even now. As for himself, he wasn't really looking at anything, or at least not seeing anything; he looked lost and exhausted and like he'd just walked out of a POW camp. He was filthy and cut and bruised and wearing the tatters of what had been someone else's uniform and his parents had both wept when they'd picked it up off the floor after it had fallen out of one of Steve's sketchbooks. Bucky understood why Steve had kept the photo -- a reminder of why he'd done what he'd done -- but he was also relieved that he hadn't seen it for the first time until years later.
The protests had ceased upstairs -- Judy having gotten over both having to bathe and doing so with her brother -- and now there was singing punctuated by the occasional yowl for a contested toy. It was a normal evening, the disruption caused by their visitor over and soon to be forgotten. Except not entirely, not for him.
The thought of going through more tests didn't appeal, but he didn't think it frightened him, not anymore. What the Nazis had done to him... it was over, it had been over for almost a decade. He wasn't the shell-shocked man in the picture anymore. There was a new war on to fix the public's eye and if he still dreamed about his own every once in a while, so did every other guy who'd come back. The tests weren't going to tell him -- or the SSR, whatever they were calling themselves now -- anything new. He hadn't noticed any changes, hadn't sprouted wings or started seeing through walls. And the giggles and stampeding feet from the bathroom -- Matty making his nightly post-bath run to his room in diaper-less freedom -- was proof that his biggest fear, that he wouldn't be able to father children, had been unfounded. He didn't know what the SSR was going to ask of him, but he could get through it. He had three -- soon to be four -- reasons upstairs to do so. Marriage and then fatherhood had not only reshaped his priorities, but they'd also reshaped his fears. He wasn't afraid for himself anymore because he didn't live for himself anymore.
"Daddy!" Judy hollered from the top of the stairwell. "Daddy, will you read with me?"
He closed Steve's album, putting the past away in favor of the future.
Getting the kids to bed was a two-person job these days, but the adults won in the end. Molly looked worn; she handled her pregnancies well enough that his sisters were jealous, but it had been a long day. He offered to make her tea so she didn't have to go back downstairs and she looked like she was torn between accepting and something else.
"This isn't you hoping I'll fall asleep before we talk, is it?"
He didn't want to talk, but he assured her that this was his attempt at being a doting husband and she accepted. She was settled on the bed when he returned with the tea and he sat down at the end on her side and took the hint to rub her feet when she poked at his thigh with her toe. Normally he enjoyed the quiet time he got to spend with her after the kids were in bed and likely to stay there; it was peaceful and unhurried and nothing at all like their pre-kids life. But the weight of what they'd have to discuss bore down on him, squeezing the edges of the calm.
"What did Peggy want?" Molly finally asked, setting the teacup on the nightstand and wiggling her toes in his hands.
He didn't look up from what he was doing. "Me."
He heard more than saw her rearrange the fold of the sheets by her hand. Watching and waiting.
"Does this have to do with what happened to you during the war?" she asked and he did look up then, surprised.
"Don't look all shocked," Molly chided. "I've been sleeping next to you for six years. I know what wakes you up in the night."
He'd never talked to her about his war; she'd known he'd been in Africa and then in Italy and that he'd gotten captured and that Steve had stormed the camp to free him, all of that was public knowledge and some of it American lore. But he'd never spoken about the rest, not to anyone, not even Steve.
"You don't," he said quietly, squeezing her foot. "You really don't."
He'd have been happy to keep this from her forever, spare her this pain because this would hurt her more than it would him at this point, but fate and Peggy Carter had decided otherwise. He met her eyes and let her see what she wanted to see in his.
She gestured with a tilt of her head for him to join her on the bed at her side. He took her hand once he had, interlacing their fingers. He wanted the connection, but couldn't do this and look at her, so he closed his eyes.
"The prison camp was a factory, mostly," he began. "But it was also where Schmidt and Zola, the head of HYDRA and his chief scientist, had labs. We didn't know it at the time, but they were trying to reproduce the super-soldier serum. They knew about Steve and Schmidt wanted to do God knows what, make himself an army or whatever it was. So the two of them, Schmidt and Zola, were brewing up cocktails of what they thought Erskine had used and then trying it out on prisoners, seeing what happened. Seeing who survived."
He heard her inhale sharply in realization and felt her squeeze his hand and he squeezed back.
"I didn't get taken until near the end," he went on, feeling tears well behind his eyelids because everything was coming back now. All of it, even things he'd never remembered once in the years since. He could smell the bitter tang of the chemicals and hear Zola's voice by his ear and he felt bile rising and swallowed it back down. "I'd had a cold when we'd gotten captured and it turned into pneumonia and they kept me apart from the others until I either got better or I died. I got better, but instead of putting me back on the line, they brought me to Zola so he could experiment on me."
His voice had broken on the last words, the first time he'd ever said them aloud. He took a deep breath and let it out, then another. Molly pulled their joined hands up to her lips and kissed his and he turned to her, a smile that had nothing to do with happiness on his face.
"I don't know how long I was with Zola," he said once he could get the words out okay. "I was out of my mind for most of it and wishing I was dead the rest. I knew I would die; nobody came back from Zola's lab. Nobody. Zola just kept using each man up until whatever he tried next killed them. I knew what was going to happen. I just didn't want to die screaming like some of the others did."
He squeezed her hand in his and used the other to wipe away tears. He could still hear the screaming, could still hear himself screaming; it was usually what woke him up from his nightmares when he dreamed about the war.
"I wasn't in a prison cell when Steve found me, like it says in the story," he continued. "I was strapped down in Zola's lab, out of my head with the drugs. If Steve hadn't seen where Zola had come from, if he hadn't been curious about what Zola might've left behind, I'd have died there when the place blew. Nobody knew where I was, nobody thought I was still alive."
He shook his head, one more tiny miracle on a day with so many. Steve had been trailing them like comets that day, everything about him full of magic and improbable success.
"I thought Steve was a fever dream, the angel of death or something," he chuckled, bemused even now. He'd heard the explosions, but had still been floating on whatever Zola had given him and he'd been barely lucid enough to be impressed with how peacefully he was taking his imminent death. "He was supposed to be in DC drawing propaganda posters, not in a HYDRA base looking like, well, Captain America. There was a lot there that looked like a fever dream."
He shuddered at the memory of Schmidt pulling off his face to reveal the red skull beneath.
"Once we got out of the camp, we still had to get back down to Allied lines," he said as he turned Molly's hand over in his, rubbing her thumb with his own, the gesture soothing to him. "I wasn't in any shape to march the first day, but by the second, I didn't have to be littered anymore. By the third, I was keeping up just fine. We got back to Steve's camp on the eighth day. It didn't take the SSR people too long to realize that I was 'special' and why. It didn't take Steve any time to realize what that would mean.
"Steve didn't sell himself to the SSR to get me away from the fighting. Or not just. He did it to get me away from the SSR."
He held up their hands so he could display the inside of his wrist and the light blue veins that were visible there, if not the blood that flowed through them. "Peggy Carter was here to tell me that she -- they -- weren't going to honor the deal anymore. They've remembered what they promised Steve they'd forget. They want to see what Zola did to me. What he turned me into."
Peggy had phrased it more nicely, but that's what she'd meant. In order to understand The American, they wanted to study the monster they already had on a leash. See if he was capable of turning a man's head clean around, but whether she meant if he could or he would, well, that was a distinction that might not have a difference. And if they decided no, he'd be powerless to change their minds.
Molly turned their hands back over so his was on top and his wedding ring reflected the light from her nightstand. He hadn't wanted one because he didn't wear jewelry; his father didn't wear one, nor did many of friends and colleagues, but Molly had felt strongly about it and he'd relented. Molly'd been right, as usual, and every time he saw it, even out of the corner of his eye while waving his cap to signal all clear to close the train doors at the station stop, it made him think of her. He looked up at her now and she cocked an eyebrow to tell him she knew what she'd done.
"Zola didn't turn you into anything," she told him firmly. "Whatever else he did to you, and I want to kill him slowly for it, that was beyond his power. He changed you, but only into someone who'd felt pain beyond what any good man should endure. And a good man is what you are, James Buchanan Barnes, no more and no less, and I am in a position to judge."
He smiled at her, genuine and, he hoped, full of love. "Thank you," he said, even though they both knew that wouldn't be enough if the government came calling.
"What did you tell Peggy, then?" Molly prompted as the companionable silence stretched. They could hear a car drive past, someone from not around here because they would have known to slow down before hitting the pothole in front of the Flannery house; Bucky winced more at the sound of the suspension recovering than the question.
"I told her she was going to have to make me the same deal she made Steve," he answered, looking down at his free hand in his lap. "I'll do what she wants in exchange for a promise to forget."
He waited for Molly to realize what he'd done. He didn't think she'd be angry with him, not for trying to protect their children. He hoped she wouldn't be angry at him later on, though, once she realized that he'd put them in danger in the first place.
Molly untangled her fingers from his and he held his breath for a second, wondering if she'd already gotten to that point. But then she sighed and brought her now-free hand to his cheek, turning his face to look at her. "You're a fool and it's a good thing I already knew that because we've been married too long for me to be able to return you for a cleverer model," she said softly, pulling him in for a gentle kiss. "Did you lock up downstairs?"
By the time he took care of the locking-up and checking in on the kids (Matty could scream like an air-raid siren if his toy lion had fallen out of his crib during the night) and his own care, Molly had turned off her lamp and gotten herself settled into the pillow fortress she built every night to support her stomach. He wasn't sure if she was asleep, but he moved around quietly just in case. He wasn't sure he'd be able to sleep and if he did, whether it would be without nightmares, but he had to put in a good faith effort; he was on the Ronkonkoma run early tomorrow.
"D'ye think you'll forgive Steve now?" Molly asked softly in the dark.
"Maybe," he answered. Which was as good as a yes as far as Steve ever went, but he wasn't ready to concede it just yet.
"Did you bring Steve here the first time, too?" Bucky asked as Peggy drove them through the gates of Camp Lehigh, past the better-armed-than-MPs guards and along a tree-lined road. The Army had pulled up stakes but not formally decommissioned the place, simply choosing not to turn it into Fort Lehigh and letting the SSR -- SHIELD -- rent it out for a fee.
It wasn't meant as irony that they were testing him here, where Steve had been selected for Project Rebirth and where, after he'd been transformed, they'd brought him for his own testing. It was simply expedient.
"Not the first time, no," Peggy answered, speeding up past the first curve and honking for some pedestrians to get out of the way. The SHIELD agents here wore a uniform that looked like regular Army fatigues until you saw the patches; Peggy had already explained that the Army had let SHIELD buy them for cheap because they were issuing new gear to the guys in Korea.
They drove past a pack of trainees running in formation with rucks on their back, making it seem even more like a regular Army base; no wonder the locals weren't the least bit suspicious. Bucky tried to find comfort in that little bit of familiar-if-he-didn't-squint; he'd been fine when he'd left the house, but he was feeling more than a little apprehensive now that they were here. He'd been told nothing about what was going to happen, just that it would take all day and to not eat anything after dinner the night before.
"Nobody knows who you really are," Peggy said as she pulled in sharply to the lot attached to a pre-fab building. "The name on the file is James, no indication whether it is a first or last name."
She stopped the car and stepped out and he followed her into the building, which turned out to be kind of false facade, just a set of security checkpoints before an elevator took them underground. The hallways here were wide and well-lit, but the place still felt like a hospital, especially with the white-coated men rushing to and fro and the stink of chemicals and cleaner underneath the fug of cigarette smoke. It was a lot like the HYDRA base, except the signs were in English and there wasn't the overwhelming stink of unwashed prisoners and human waste. He swallowed hard and followed Peggy's purposeful stride down the hall.
He'd admitted to Molly that he didn't really remember the first round of testing in '43. He knew it'd been in DC and he remembered that he'd flown directly from Italy without getting to go to New York first, that before he'd left Italy he'd had a fight with Steve that would have escalated to violence had Steve not used their strength disparity to hold him still. But there was a gap that covered the time from the plane ride to when he had already arrived in Brooklyn. His first memories of being back on US soil were of sitting in his mother's kitchen eating an apple dumpling. He didn't know if it was because he'd just shut down in DC or because he'd been a little hazy around that time in general, but he suspected the former because the rest of that time was pretty clear. How bad it had actually been, he didn't know, but clearly it had been too much. He could only pray that this time, it either wasn't so bad or he could forget it as completely. Maybe they could make him forget.
There was a staircase on the other side of the door they passed through that led down to what looked like the garage where he brought his car for repairs, except that the equipment was smaller in scale -- for human bodies, not autos. Peggy paused on the steps, looking for someone, giving him a chance to catch up and look around. There was a giant tube in the corner, mounted on metal arms, that looked like something out of the old horror shorts, a vampire coffin for a modern kind of vampire, maybe. It's not like there was any daylight down here.
Peggy found who she was looking for and started walking again, turning left at the foot of the stairs and wending her way around the tables and the men focused on their test tubes and microscopes. Her target turned out to be a fellow in his fifties, maybe, gray hair and glasses and a smile for Peggy that was just short of being a little too appreciative of how she filled out her suit. Bucky couldn't see how Peggy reacted, but he didn't bother to hide that he didn't care for it when the man's attention turned to him. He might not be happy with Peggy coming into his life like a wrecking ball, but she was still Steve's girl. Not that she needed his help; when she spoke to Doctor Wakefield, her voice was frosty enough for even the biggest idiot to notice and Wakefield, it turned out, was no idiot. He was the head honcho around here, which didn't mean he wasn't an idiot, but he stopped treating Peggy like a cigarette girl. Bucky, on the other hand, was still a lab specimen.
Wakefield called over a black guy named Wendell and told him to take Bucky off to get changed and take his vitals and get him fed, what sounded like the basic stuff you'd tell a nurse or an orderly to do. Except that once Bucky -- after a quick look over at Peggy, who nodded -- had been led out of the garage-like main floor and into a side room that looked more like what passed for a doctor's office in the Army, it turned out Wendell the orderly was actually Doctor Clarence Wendell, MD-PhD.
"Seems like overkill," Bucky responded as he changed behind a leather curtain into what was definitely surplus Army PT gear. The curtain was really to shield the doctor during some test and Wendell had told him he'd be getting undressed in front of other people later, but it was an offer of the dignity of privacy on a day when there wasn't going to be any and Bucky appreciated the gesture. "Of course, I never finished college in the first place."
He'd been good enough in high school to be a day student at Brooklyn College and he'd gone for two years, but he had quit after that and gone to work instead. The first year, everyone had been so enthusiastic on Bucky's behalf -- the first Barnes to go to college! -- that it hadn't seemed so bad, but the enthusiasm of others couldn't carry him forever. The classes weren't too hard, just everything else. His parents were still supporting four kids with him in school during the day and he wasn't sure anymore what college would get him for a career. He'd had no designs on being a doctor or a lawyer, didn't want to be a teacher, and didn't have the connections to move into business. His parents had been vehement that his decision shouldn't be based on their finances and they'd been a little disappointed because they'd had dreams of him being a doctor, but it had been his sister Dottie who'd been the first Barnes to graduate college and he'd been glad for her with no regrets.
"My parents thought I might've been avoiding the 'getting to work' part of the show," Wendell admitted as Bucky emerged from behind the curtain with his clothes in his hands. Wendell gestured toward a set of hooks hanging on the wall and Bucky went over to hang them. "But it got me here, so it was just the right amount of kill."
Bucky thought back to Wakefield snapping his fingers to summon Wendell like a porter and hoped it was as worth it as Wendell seemed to think.
The exam that Wendell performed was quick and nothing that a regular doctor wouldn't have done and Wendell didn't seem either impressed or surprised by the results until he whacked Bucky on the knee with the hammer and hadn't been prepared for the reaction time or strength.
"Hunh," he chuffed out. "You got good reflexes all over?"
Bucky gave him a weak smile. "Kinda why I'm here."
Wendell raised his eyebrows because yeah, he knew that. "Knowing it and seeing it's a different story," he said. "Especially in person. I've seen the footage of Steve Rogers's tests, but that's almost like a movie, you know? Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd did the same kind of stuff on film, too, and there's not much difference watching it on the screen."
It hurt to hear Steve spoken about like a stranger, like a fictional character, and Bucky bit his lip to keep from saying that Steve had been a friend and that seeing that friend suddenly appear twice as large as life and just in the nick of time had been both everything and nothing like a movie.
"You have Rogers's tests?" he asked instead. He wondered what Steve had looked like during the test, whether he'd been amazed at his own changes or terrified by the camera as he'd always been until the USO had apparently knocked it out of him. The pictures of Steve in the album at home were sometimes laughable in their stiffness; Steve had done okay when caught unawares, but if you'd told him to pose he'd look all wide-eyed and freeze and the result was that he'd look like an escaped prisoner who'd just heard a police siren. Or else his eyes would be closed. The only exceptions had been when he'd been a little drunk or too tired to react quick enough; it was just as well that he'd learned how to pose because Captain America hadn't been able to get drunk and it would've taken much more than exhaustion to dull his reactions.
"They're really not all that interesting," Wendell replied, going back to the table in the corner and doing something with his back to Bucky. "He was just doing the same things you're going to be doing. We're going to be filming you, too."
Bucky might've said something about that, but then Wendell turned around with a tray with syringes on them and then Bucky couldn't say a word. He hadn't been near a syringe since '43, let alone so many. He inhaled loudly through his nose and let it out just as noisily, settling himself. He'd known this was coming, had been expecting it, and he'd thought himself prepared. But apparently not, or maybe not without some warning.
"Not a fan of needles?" Wendell asked with a smile, amused. "These aren't so bad; they're just to draw blood. The ones they're gonna use later are gonna be much bigger. Sorry."
Wendell was still smiling a little as he reached out to tourniquet Bucky's arm and Bucky wondered who Wendell thought he was if he was making jokes about needles. Wendell could be an asshole who just enjoyed watching someone else's misery, but those kinds of assholes wouldn't have turned their backs as Bucky changed behind a curtain.
The stick of the needle was a split-second of pure horror, but then it was over and Bucky could watch the rest of the blood draw with a dispassionate lack of concern. At least until the third vial was filled and he had to ask just how much more was going to be required.
"You never met a Negro vampire?" Wendell asked cheerfully, then sobered a little. "This is the last one."
The next bit of fluid collection earned Bucky an entirely different kind of smile from Wendell as he explained what was required.
"You're kidding," he said flatly as Wendell handed him a small sample cup. "Come on."
"What, you want a bigger cup?" Wendell knew very well this time that Bucky was uncomfortable and his amusement was because of it, not in spite of it or in ignorance of it. "I'll wait outside."
It wasn't the principle of the thing, either the act or its necessity -- church-going Catholic or not, Molly's willingness waned during her pregnancies while his urges did not and this might be the only way to find out if anything had been passed on to their children. But the circumstances were going to make it difficult -- he'd stroked one off in odd or dangerous places before, but not since he'd come back from the war and not since the smell of chemicals and antiseptic and iodine started making his heart beat faster for all the wrong reasons.
It felt like it took forever to tune out the world enough to even think of touching himself, but when he opened the door afterward, Wendell didn't make a joke and just took the cup for labeling.
The next stop was X-rays, where Wendell asked if Bucky had kids while he positioned the lead blanket. Bucky nearly answered "two, one more on the way" before remembering where he was and why and what Peggy had promised him and so he said no, not yet. "Well, then you'd best keep that blanket in place in case you change your mind," Wendell warned him before going to disappear behind his own protection.
The jokes were about glowing in the dark as they moved on to the next stop, which was a break room with coffee and ham-and-cheese sandwiches and grapes. "We needed you to fast for the blood draw, but now you'll need your strength back," Wendell told him as he pulled out a cigarette case. There was another man sitting at a small table in the corner reading as he stirred something in a bowl, ignoring them completely. Wendell let him eat, enjoying his own cigarette, but carried what conversation there was. He didn't ask Bucky about his past or his present, keeping to neutral topics like baseball. Which wasn't all that neutral once Wendell admitted to becoming a bit of a Giants fan since moving to New Jersey -- "hey, Ernie Harwell's who comes in on the radio down here!" -- but they could talk about Kiner and Minoso and how much more tolerable Allie Reynolds would be if he weren't pitching for the Yankees.
After a pair of sandwiches and a handful of grapes washed down with coffee, Bucky was led on to the next station, which was a dimly lit room with machines to test his vision and hearing. He had very good of both, but he didn't think he was very special there, or at least that what had been done to him made much of a difference -- those senses had made him a good soldier before his capture. But he had no way of knowing because the people who tested him didn't say a word to him that they didn't have to and didn't react at all to the results.
"Now's when you get to make like a performing monkey," Wendell told him apologetically after he came in to retrieve Bucky. "It's probably the most important part, though."
The hall they entered looked like one of the lecture rooms from his college days with a stage up front with blackboards and stadium seating at the other end with desks and chairs on the different levels. The seating was mostly occupied and Bucky saw Peggy among the audience and felt relieved and then was surprised by that. She gave him a nod that made him feel a little less like the tiger at the zoo, at least until Wakefield took custody of him from Wendell, who disappeared into the crowd, and ordered him to stand in front of the blank white space on the front wall between the blackboards.
What followed then was almost relaxing in as Bucky was ordered to take off his shirt and stand barefoot in the PT shorts and turn and hold position for the movie camera like a model for a magazine or a prisoner for a police lineup. He was told to jump and stretch and then measured like a prize fighter and weighed again, even though Wendell had had him step on a scale and he'd eaten an hour earlier. It was strange and a little uncomfortable to be on display, but it was also nothing like Zola's lab, just impersonal without being completely dehumanizing. Kind of like basic training had been and if Bucky closed his eyes, he could almost imagine it was back then, full of petty humiliations and nonsensical orders that had an actual purpose he couldn't divine. He'd signed up for more than he'd bargained for then, too.
The feeling of deja vu from Basic continued once they moved from modeling to dodging projectiles -- rubber pellets fired from a special gun; they moved much slower than bullets but still hurt the couple of times they were aimed center-mass and he'd not been able to avoid them completely. There were no apologies when that happened, which certainly was like Basic had been. From dodging to catching, this time tennis balls from a machine that fired them like mortars and Bucky's palms got numb but he was able to lose himself in the activity, forgetting where he was and why in favor of concentrating on catching each one. It was a little like playing catch with Judy and her pink ball; her enthusiasm outstripped her aim by a healthy margin, although the balls came at him now with a bit more pepper than she was able to put on them. They didn't seem that fast, though, and he was able to catch all of them without breaking a sweat, but when the machine stopped and he looked up and once again saw the faces of the observers and they all looked a little stunned. Even Peggy, which made no sense because she'd seen Steve do all sorts of things with his super-skills. It was uncomfortable and he turned away from them, going over to where a glass of water had been placed for him and draining it.
When he went back on the stage, Wakefield ordered him over to where a cord-and-pulley weight lift was set up, like you'd see at the arcade down at Coney Island for the strongmen just without the rainbow colors and Wakefield's assistants weren't as leggy, female, or saucily dressed. The only weightlifting Bucky ever did was picking up his kids and applying brute force to broken train doors at work, but he didn't think he embarrassed himself too badly. The circus theme continued through the end of the strength and reflex tests until Wakefield finally had enough and barked out something to his assistants and walked off, the audience stirring to action as he disappeared. Bucky was left waiting on stage, so he put on his shirt and stood there until someone approached him. It wasn't Wendell this time, but a middle-aged man with a limp and, when he opened his mouth, a Polish accent.
Doctor Greenbaum was a psychiatrist who specialized in cognitive development and explained to him as they walked to yet another room that he would be testing Bucky's memory and analytical skills, how quickly he processed data and how well he retained it.
"I hope you aren't going to be measuring me up to Rogers," Bucky said as they walked down the hallway. "The serum didn't do anything to his memory."
Steve had always had the memory of an elephant, which had sometimes been great and sometimes been terrible. What had changed by the time Bucky met him as Captain America had been his ability to focus. Steve had been a daydreamer, which hadn't helped either in school or in the schoolyard. He'd concentrate on his art, but everything else he could easily get distracted from. But Captain America had been another story and Bucky honestly didn't know if the serum had done that or simply the war. Not all of the changes in Steve had come out of Erskine's bottles.
Greenbaum gave him a measuring look and Bucky belated realized that he shouldn't have given any indication that he'd known Steve and hoped that that had been a detail that had been in the stuff they'd written about him after the plane had gone down. He needed to be more careful, more mindful. These were all very smart people and not one of them was his friend or even his ally, not even Wendell; they were all interested in him for less-than-good reasons and were being held in check by a flimsy agreement they hadn't signed on to. Greenbaum had been friendly toward him after he'd been treated like a circus monkey and he couldn't respond to that as he had. He'd been away from the battlefield for a long time, but he needed to be back on it now. These people weren't his captors, but they were more dangerous in many ways.
Greenbaum's room was somehow spare and cluttered at the same time, bookcases around the walls crammed messily with papers and books but his desk and the table to which he led Bucky were clean and organized. The memory tests weren't what he'd thought they'd be -- like the card game, turning over matches -- but instead required him to look at a series of pictures for a few seconds and then answers questions about them, then the process was repeated with lists of numbers and then paragraphs of text. Bucky had never had Steve's gift of perfect recall, but he'd been working for the railroad for almost eight years and, like every other conductor worth his salt, he could look over a picture -- or a car full of passengers -- and remember the important details, same with skimming lists of numbers or train schedules. He cruised through the memory tests. His work skills helped him out with the computational and analytical tests as well. If he could give correct change for an on-board ticket purchase without missing a beat and re-work the schedule in his head to know if they were going to have to ask for the connecting train at Valley Stream to be held up for them while a dozen passengers griped at him for the delay, then sitting in a quiet office adding sums and figuring out which one of Alice, Bob, Carol, or Don had bought the red apple or the green apple wasn't going to be difficult. He couldn't tell if Greenbaum was pleased or disappointed that he wasn't more flustered by the problems placed before him.
It was Peggy who came to collect him from Greenbaum. "How are you holding up?" she asked as they walked back the way they'd came, to the elevator. Her tone was professional more than compassionate, but there was enough humanity to let him know that she wasn't asking for form's sake.
"I think the worst is yet to come," he answered honestly.
She gave him a smile that was almost kind as they waited for the elevator doors to open. "You're doing much better than last time, if that's any comfort."
He looked at her sharply. Had she been there? He didn't remember her being there, which, granted, he didn't remember anything, but that seemed like something he would recall. "I don't think I could do worse."
She smirked agreement, but gave him nothing more, pulling open the elevator door and gesturing for him to precede her. Her own version of politeness or a none-too-subtle means of reinforcing that he was the damsel in distress and she was the hero this time, he didn't know.
Upstairs and outside and a jeep was waiting to take them across the camp to a running track, where Bucky did timed sprints and then ran for distance, getting his heart rate checked before and after each time. Then to a shooting range. He'd been an expert shot before his capture with both a pistol and a rifle and he'd been a sniper in Africa, but in theory none of them knew any of that. He'd shot since the war; Charlie was a cop now and once in a while would get Bucky to come to the range for a little sibling rivalry shootout. (Bucky beat him on points every time and he didn't know why Charlie kept it up; their mother said it was a way to build a relationship with the big brother who'd gone to war just when the age difference would have stopped mattering so much and had come home a stranger.) His first few shots weren't what he'd have liked, but then he got the feel and the rest were good. Shooting was relaxing, it always had been. He'd been surprised when he'd first held a gun, how natural and easy it was, but now it was something he took as expected, to fall into the rhythm and see the proper results. He didn't know if this had been planned as a kind of break for him or if it was just coincidence, but he felt calmer as they drove back to the underground bunker and whatever came next after Peggy handed him back over to another someone in a long white coat who didn't bother introducing himself.
It didn't take long for that calm to disappear, however, once they were back down the elevator. He was told to shower and given only a pair of Army issue shorts and a pair of socks to put back on once he was cleaned off, then he was led to what looked like an operating room.
He froze at the doorway, looking around at the machines and the equipment and the steel bed with the restraining straps dangling and the impatient, expectant faces of the doctors who just wanted what Zola and Schmidt had put inside of him. He couldn't breathe for a moment, then he could but not easily. He felt lightheaded and ready to vomit and he wanted to run all the way home to Woodside in his underwear. He wanted a pistol back in his hands, although whether to shoot himself or them, he couldn't have answered in that moment. He couldn't move, couldn't hear what was being said to him, couldn't feel the fingers of the hand pulling him forcefully into the room.
And then everything snapped back into place, his heart stopped hammering and his ears heard voices and he could move his feet because he had to. This was what he'd agreed to, this was what kept these men from Judy and Matty and the baby he knew Molly was going to want to name Steven if it was a boy. This is what he now prayed to God he'd forget once it was over.
He got on the table, centered himself on the padding, and lay down on his side as commanded; his fingertips felt the grooves on the side of the table that were meant to catch the flowing blood. He concentrated on his breathing -- on breathing at all -- and alternated between closing his eyes to make it all go away and needing to see what was happening. Almost all of which was happening behind him, which didn't help his anxiety. He saw motion by his feet and it turned out to be Wendell, who was not smiling now, was looking a bit queasy, actually, and Bucky chuckled to himself because good, he wasn't the only one.
His shorts were cut away along his side, exposing his hip and his right butt cheek and he felt the coolness of an alcohol swab and then something else wiped over the area as well. Nobody was talking to him, he didn't know what anyone was doing but that might've been because he hadn't been able to listen when he'd been told, although he suspected a needle was going to be involved because they always cleaned before needles. Zola, who'd been otherwise oblivious to his subjects' filth and stench, would swab before jabbing in a syringe.
They warned him, at least, that he'd feel a prick of a needle. "It's an anesthetic," he was told. "It will numb the area so we can take the samples without discomfort to you."
"You know I need more than normal, right?" he said in what sounded like a surprisingly calm tone.
"Yes, Mister James," a voice said from behind him. "We are aware of your accelerated metabolism from your previous exam."
It sounded strange, hearing it like that. He knew that's what it was, but he never thought about it so... scientifically. He didn't get drunk easily and he didn't really gain weight, but that's as far as it went -- he got ribbed a little bit by the guys for eating all the time and not getting a gut. It was nothing too out of the ordinary, not with his skinny parents, and he didn't have to ignore it the way he had to pretend he didn't notice some of the other things.
The prick of the needle was more than a prick, but it was over quickly and he'd seen the needle approach from the corner of his eye. They left him be for a minute, probably so that whatever they shot him up with could take effect, and Bucky was ready to breathe deeply and try his best to endure the rest without embarrassing himself... until he saw the next needle. It was massive, a comic-book spike of a needle and it was coming at him from his front side, so he could watch it approach, held in the hand of a doctor who was carrying it like a dagger, and he couldn't think of his dignity as he watched, couldn't think of anything as the syringe came closer and without so much as a glance up at his face to see if he was ready, was jabbed in to his hip with enough force that it didn't stop when it hit bone.
He screamed then, in pain. In terror. He couldn't breathe, couldn't see with his eyes tearing up, and he heard himself screaming but it didn't feel like him because he felt nothing but fiery pain radiating through his body like a shockwave. Like it had in Zola's lab. He reached out to yank it free and felt hands holding him back, not enough force to stop him until it was and he was being pushed down against the table and he fought, fought like he hadn't been able to in Zola's lab. But the response was the same, more bodies holding him down, restraints being strapped over him, more needles pushing more drugs into his veins and it didn't matter, he was stronger than they were, stronger than the drugs, Zola had made him stronger than both. He looked around to see if Zola was watching, smug grin on the tiny bastard's face as he watched to see what his concoctions had wrought, but he couldn't see him, couldn't see anything familiar, and then there was something over his face and he saw nothing.
He wasn't out completely, he realized, just lax and loose and rubbery and he could still hear voices, angry and surprised and too fuzzy to make out. His German had always sucked anyway. It took effort to open his eyes but he did because the last time he'd felt like this, Steve had come for him. He felt his eyes burn with tears when he just saw a light fixture. He didn't know how long he'd been out, but he knew they were still working on him, doing whatever they wanted, and he couldn't make his limbs move enough to fight them. He moved enough to startle them, though, and he heard someone shout at someone else about why the hell was he still awake. He could feel a weight dragging him down to unconsciousness and all he could do, all he had time to do, was pray that he woke up.
He woke suddenly; he was alert when a moment before he hadn't been. He didn't open his eyes -- Zola's people left you alone, most of the time, if you were out but still breathing. He listened, hoping he could pick out something, as he cataloged his body: he could feel his feet, his legs, his hands, his arms, his back; he knew his head was still attached and only hoped his balls were, too -- Zola had taken those from some of his subjects. His right hip hurt, but nothing else, and he was thirsty but not dangerously so. He didn't hear anything, just a quiet hum he recognized as air flow and the ripple of paper, either moving on the breeze or a page being turned.
And then he heard a door open and then Johnnie Ray's voice singing in the distance and that didn't fit, Zola had only played Wagner and Strauss, and he knew all in a moment that this wasn't then, wasn't there. He wasn't in the HYDRA factory; he was in New Jersey.
There was the sound of something being put down and footsteps moving away and the door closing, leaving Johnnie Ray to walk his baby back home somewhere else.
He opened his eyes and saw the operating room, and breathed deeply, letting it out in a gust. A second later, Wendell was standing over him.
"Welcome back," Wendell said, watching him with concern.
"I'm not gonna hit you," Bucky got out, although it came out raspy and low and raw.
"Good to know," Wendell replied with a quick smile that disappeared as fast as it had come. He continued to look Bucky over with a professional eye. "Although I'm not sure I'd blame you if you did. How do you feel?"
Scared. Embarrassed. Angry. Exhausted. Vulnerable. "Been worse."
Wendell chuckled, but he didn't look amused. "I'm a lot less surprised by that answer than I would have been this morning," he said, taking a step back. "Can you sit up? Slowly, slowly."
He held out his hand for Bucky to use to steady himself, but Bucky didn't take it, just moving stiffly -- the dressing at his hip was well-padded. He didn't feel unsteady, or at least like he was about to topple over. He felt unsteady in every other way and arranged the blanket they'd covered him with around his waist and lap like it could protect him the way the X-ray blanket had.
Once he'd proven himself capable of sitting, Wendell went over to the sink and filled a glass of water, handing it over with the exhortation to drink slowly or it would all come right back up.
"I know I'm not supposed to ask," Wendell began once the empty glass was handed back over, "but... all they told us is that you were a test subject for one of the attempts to recreate Erskine's serum back in the Forties." He paused, hands moving restlessly over the glass's rim. "Did we do this to you?"
Bucky smiled. He was relieved that Wendell didn't know the answer, that nothing he'd done while he was out of his mind with fear and convinced he'd been back on Zola's table had given his identity away -- he hadn't rattled off his name, rank, and serial number or started begging in German for them to stop. Or maybe Wendell hadn't been there for it, but Bucky suspected that if anyone had left the room, they'd have been called back to hold him down.
"Can't say much for your bedside manner today," he said and Wendell had the good grace to look ashamed. He knew why Wendell was asking and was glad for it -- a little less glory of the science and a little more remembering that they were doing science on people couldn't hurt in a place like this. "But the SSR weren't the only ones trying."
It was all but an admission that he'd been a POW and not a volunteer, but he knew it wouldn't get Wendell any closer to figuring out who he was. The original file of Patient X, to which everything from today would be added, made it clear that he'd been a HYDRA test subject and if Wendell didn't know that now, he would eventually.
Wendell took a step back and clutched the glass more tightly.
"I'm sorry," he said, meeting Bucky's gaze. "I'm sorry for what they did and I'm sorry that we acted like it didn't matter. It's in your file, isn't it?"
Bucky shrugged. The important people knew and didn't care because it didn't matter except that it made sample collection more difficult. If it had mattered, he wouldn't be here.
"The people you work for have their priorities," he said, since "the people you work for are soulless bastards who'd do anything to get ahead in the game" was less useful, if more accurate.
He slid off the table and on to his feet, happy that his legs held him up without wobbling, once Wendell turned to put the glass down. He didn't want to talk about this anymore because he didn't want Wendell working up the courage to ask why he was here today.
There was a robe folded up on a tray table and Bucky went to it, shrugging it on and then letting both the blanket and the tattered underwear fall away underneath before belting it tightly. He left those on the tray table.
"They've canceled the rest of the tests for today," Wendell explained as gestured toward the door and they left the operating room. "Agent Carter'll take you home."
"I made enough of a scene?" Bucky asked, relieved to be finished but disappointed that this wasn't going to be the end of things.
"Nobody really kept track of how much we used to bring you down," Wendell said as they walked. Take me down, Bucky corrected in his head. "And we need to re-establish your metabolic rate because it's nothing like it was when you were last tested. What you were given should have worked and, clearly, it didn't. The next tests... they hurt, no getting around that. And if we can't minimize that pain, or knock you out entirely if that's best, then it's good to wait until we can. You shouldn't need to go through that again."
Wendell didn't follow him into the room where his clothes were still hanging on their pegs. He could see the starts of bruises on his arms and chest, long ones from the straps and the hands holding him down and small blotches where the needles had gone in. He'd probably best change for bed in the bathroom tonight; Molly was going to be on edge no matter what and seeing him like this wasn't going to be good for her with the baby so close.
He splashed water on his face before putting on his undershirt and made an effort to straighten his hair with wet fingers once he was dressed, but Peggy still nearly did a double-take when she came to collect him from the break room, where he was waiting by himself with a copy of yesterday's Times. She put on her best face, though, and gave him a brisk exhortation to get going so that they could avoid the traffic.
The ride back to Manhattan was quiet; Peggy drove and he looked out the window until they hit the tunnel.
"Do you want me to drive you all the way back?" Peggy asked.
The plan had been for her to drop him off at Penn Station and he'd take the train home from there; it was supposed to have been later and the rush hour traffic would have been murder.
"Do I look that bad?" he asked by way of reply.
Peggy made a point of looking him over, all without giving the impression that she'd forgotten about the road in front of them.
"No, but I'm sure Molly will think otherwise," she finally answered.
"Train'll still be faster," he said and so she swung south once they cleared the tunnel instead of heading north for the Queensboro Bridge.
"They'll want to complete the testing," she warned him as she double-parked on Eighth, ignoring the honking of the taxis she was obstructing. "I don't know when it will be, but I'll let you know when I do."
Bucky nodded, reaching for the door handle. He knew and he'd have to prepare himself for it, but right now, he needed to recover from today and pretend that next time didn't exist. He needed to see his family, see his kids to remind himself of why he'd agreed and why this was so important. He needed time for the bruises to fade, both the ones on his body and the ones on his soul. "But you got what you needed already, right?"
She made a face that could've meant anything. "I got answers," she said. "Some of them were for questions I had, some were for questions I didn't know I had. I have more. But, yes, this helped tremendously and I thank you for that."
He laughed, low and bitter, as he opened the door. "You don't have to thank people for doing what they had no choice but to do."
He closed the door gently, patting it twice, before turning to go toward the station entrance. He didn't look behind him.
