Four months ago, if someone had told Sam that one day he’d find himself in the back seat of a dubiously-acquired Jeep Grand Cherokee with a formerly brainwashed assassin at the wheel, Captain America riding shotgun, and a trunk full of weapons and ammunition, he probably would have asked for a toke of whatever they’d been smoking.
And yet here he is.
He’s still not quite sure he’d made the right decision by convincing Bucky to let him tag along. A part of him fears he’d been too manipulative in doing so, putting Bucky in a situation where he felt he couldn’t refuse, but he’s also clinging to the faint possibility that Bucky’s lack of resistance towards Sam’s presence indicates at least a subconscious desire to have someone around who is aware of his true situation, even if Sam couldn’t possibly actually understand it.
This car ride is the longest that Sam has seen Steve and Bucky interacting together and the atmosphere is far lighter than he’d expected, with Bucky and Steve caught in a competition of who can tell Sam the most embarrassing story about the other (Sam finds himself partial to the one about Steve trying to look cool in front of a bunch of other kids by trying to spit like a professional baseball player and ending up with a hell of a loogie dangling attractively from his chin).
It all seems to be going so smoothly that Sam feels guilty for being on high alert for any indication that things are about to go south. Maybe he’d pegged this situation all wrong after all. Maybe Steve was right, that he was only seeing signs of damage in Bucky because that’s what he’d expected to see, which means that Bucky was also right about Sam preventing him from being able to be okay by treating him as if he was supposed to be behaving in a certain way.
They make it to Pittsburgh in good time, where Bucky tracks down a former HYDRA officer in the suburb of South Fayette. He makes Sam and Steve wait in the car while he questions the man atop an abandoned building. Sam fully expects the interrogation to end with the sound of a single gunshot or perhaps the sick thud of a body hitting pavement, but then the man reappears before Bucky does, scurrying away, the very picture of a dog with its tail between its legs, and Bucky returns to the car without a word.
Things are a little tenser after that, as if this first stop has reminded them all that they’re not exactly on this road trip for the sight seeing, and by the time they stop off at a motel in Dover, Ohio late that night, Sam has never been more ready to hit the hay.
He tries to book his own room, but Steve insists that the three of them will be fine in one room with two double beds because he and Bucky can share.
“It’ll be just like when we were kids,” he says to Bucky with a warm smile.
Bucky returns the expression almost flawlessly and replies, “Better than putting the couch cushions on the floor, I guess,” but the moment Steve looks away, Sam notices Bucky’s chest starting to heave as his breathing picks up.
When they reach their room, Steve immediately flops down onto one of the beds and lets out a contented sigh. Both Sam and Bucky remain standing, and Bucky’s gotten his breathing back under control, but in a too-controlled, overly deliberate way that suggests it’s taking all of his willpower to do so.
“Hey, uh,” Sam says, “Maybe... maybe the guy with the deadly metal arm should get his own bed...?”
Bucky immediately whirls around to glare at him.
“It’s fine,” he growls.
Steve frowns. “Y’know, maybe Sam has a point... You were never exactly a sound sleeper, and I’m not really looking to get that fist in my face again.”
Sam nearly sags with relief; Bucky would never have accepted an out from Sam, but now that Steve himself has given one, there shouldn’t be a problem, right?
Except Bucky has raised his head defiantly, eyes narrowed and jaw set, and he’s saying, “I sleep like a log now. It’ll be fine.”
Sam shoots him a look of confused disapproval, no longer caring what Steve thinks of his reactions. They’d handed Bucky the perfect excuse to keep to himself – why the hell isn’t he taking it? The only reason Sam can come up with is that Bucky is trying to prove something – to him, to himself, to Steve - but he can’t imagine it’s worth it.
Steve must interpret Sam’s expression as concern for him, because he says, “Don’t worry, Sam; he’s right. I don’t hear a peep out of him at night anymore.”
Bucky bares his teeth at Sam in a triumphant smirk as he makes his way over to the bed and settles down next to Steve, and not for the first time Sam feels himself becoming frustrated with Bucky’s stubbornness. (Also not for the first time, he hates himself for it.) He knows it’s not Bucky’s fault, and he understands one hundred percent where Bucky is coming from, but that doesn’t make it any less maddening.
He tries to remind himself that this isn’t his problem anymore – that it never really was because Bucky never asked him for his help.
Then again, such a request rarely ever expresses itself in words. Where would Sam be without the people who’d seen his desperate actions for what they subconsciously were? The people who he’d initially viewed as a threat and whose concern he’d resentfully interpreted as a totally uncalled for encroachment upon his privacy? Sam may not have directly reached out to anyone, but he’s only where he is today because of the one or two hands that never withdrew no matter how many times he’d swatted them away, so he’ll be damned if he doesn’t do the same right now.
He heaves a weary sigh, climbing into his own bed and laying down facing the wall, which he stares at until it doesn’t make sense anymore.
+
He wakes up the following morning after a surprisingly uninterrupted sleep to find that it’s just him and Bucky in the room.
“Where’s Steve?” he asks Bucky, who’s sitting in the armchair watching the television, which is on mute.
“Getting breakfast,” Bucky replies without looking away from the screen.
He looks fucking exhausted. Sam wonders if he slept at all, or if this is just the way he normally looks when Steve isn’t around forcing a performance out of him.
“Look, I’m sorry about yesterday,” Sam says awkwardly. “About... the beds.”
It takes Bucky so long to respond that Sam starts to think he hadn’t heard him despite there being no other sounds in the room, but after maybe thirty seconds or so, he turns off the television and finally looks Sam in the eye.
Sam braces himself for an outburst of some kind, but all Bucky says is, “It’s okay.”
“...It is?”
Bucky shrugs, seeming to hunch in on himself slightly. “I get what you’re trying to do. But I can handle this.” He sees Sam start to open his mouth and cuts him off with a faint grin. “No, I actually mean it this time. It wasn’t– I was... scared... at first, but it wasn’t... It was okay. I– I actually kinda liked it. Being close to Steve.”
Sam nods thoughtfully, feeling a lot lighter all of a sudden, though also slightly guilty for once again having assumed that Bucky was going to react a certain way.
“He’s the one good thing,” Bucky mumbles after a moment, so quietly that Sam nearly misses it. “I know you think I can’t tell the difference between people who will hurt me and people who won’t, but I can. But only... only with Steve. It’s only Steve. That’s why he can’t...” He trails off abruptly, as if realising he’s shared way more than he meant to, then says with considerable finality, “It’s only Steve.”
Sam swallows hard. He desperately wants to explain to Bucky, somehow, that Steve isn’t the only person in the world who won’t hurt him, but he doesn’t want to push him too hard. Besides, this new revelation is still more than Sam would have expected, and it lends him a certain amount of hope for the future, because if Bucky can already recognise Steve as a safe person, then that’s one less hurdle they have to cross, and a damn huge one, too.
On the other hand, this could very well be the primary cause behind Bucky’s reluctance to let Steve in on what he’s truly going through. Sam remembers only too well the guilt and humiliation that drove him to keep his troubles hidden from his loved ones when he was at his lowest, not wanting to worry them or have them think any less of him, and that was even without the compounded shame of sexual trauma or the added burden of both having only one person who knew who you were before as well as being that one person to someone else.
“You’re his best friend, Bucky,” Sam says softly, cautiously. “Nothing could ever change that.”
Bucky sucks in a quivering breath and it seems as though he might speak again, but then the door is creaking open because Steve has apparently chosen this exact moment to come bustling in carrying two bags of admittedly delicious-smelling takeout from IHOP.
Bucky’s demeanour immediately changes. He slaps on a smile and slouches down a little in his chair to appear more relaxed. It all leaves Sam feeling a little sick inside but the pancakes still taste really good.
+
They continue eastward.
The dynamic between Steve and Bucky has shifted ever so slightly since that first night, as if sharing the bed had opened up the doors to a whole new level of interaction. They touch each other a lot more, and while it is pretty evenly split in terms of which one of them initiates contact, Sam has noticed that Bucky fares a lot better when he is the one to do so. He seems to genuinely enjoy touching Steve – a playful shove on the shoulder, a steadying hand at the small of his back – but whenever it’s the other way around, with Steve reaching towards Bucky, there’s always a split-second of panicked tension that seizes Bucky’s body before he’s able to get himself under control again. He’s caught in a heartbreaking tug of war between two opposing instincts – desperate for touch that does not hurt, but not yet fully able to believe such a thing exists.
Sam wishes there were a way to communicate this to Steve, because it seems like this whole issue of physical contact is a bit of a double-edged sword. Bucky is quite obviously touch-starved, but the days when Steve makes the first move too often are ones when Bucky is tense and closed-off and interrogations end in a gunshot.
To Steve’s credit, he does eventually take notice. He initiates contact less and less, instead waiting for Bucky to come to him, watching him with a cautious eye, though he’s given no indication that he’s come anywhere close to suspecting the true reason behind Bucky’s behaviour.
The secret stays nestled in Sam’s throat like a seething, shrieking stone.
+
At first it looks like the trip really is doing Bucky some good, but as they approach the one week mark on the road, it starts to seem less and less so. He’s becoming increasingly careless, sloppy, savage. The hours on the road are uncomfortably consumed by his silent, deadly focus instead of the cheery banter from before, and Steve and Sam find themselves having to clean up after him when he leaves too much of a bloody mess behind and can’t be bothered to cover up his tracks.
He has a flashback in a motel room on the outskirts of Tulsa, a quiet but terrifying ordeal that has him huddled up in a corner, murmuring feverishly in Russian and occasionally pushing out with his metal arm as if trying to fend off some invisible attacker. He doesn’t respond to any of Steve’s quiet pleas or Sam’s attempts to ground him. It lasts under ten minutes, but he comes out of it completely and totally exhausted and thankfully falls asleep not too long afterwards.
“Please stop,” Steve says faintly.
“What?” Sam asks with a raised eyebrow. He hadn’t been doing anything.
Steve jerks, like he’d forgotten Sam was there.
“‘Please stop,’” Steve repeats. “That’s– I don’t know a lot of Russian, but that...”
He trails off and lets the full weight of the implication sink in. The expression he’s fixed Sam with is equal parts dread-filled and expectant, as if he’s preparing himself for Sam to reveal something to him, but Sam just looks away and doesn’t say a word.
They let Bucky have his own bed that night.
+
After that, Bucky abruptly changes their travel plan to completely bypass Oklahoma City in favour of heading straight for a small mountain range in southeast Colorado. He says it contains an old HYDRA holding cell that was specifically tailored to house the Winter Soldier when he wasn’t in cryo, and Steve pales visibly when he hears that, but then his features go blank and hard as he braces himself for whatever latest horror they’re about to see.
It’s an hour long climb to a plateau on the north face of the mountain. It doesn’t look like much until Bucky removes a chunk of stone to reveal a number pad and punches in an eight-digit code, causing the rock wall to open up into a crude cave-like hideout. Though it appears to be long-abandoned, the stench of sickness, terror and death remains startlingly detectable in the musty air. The people responsible for the atrocities that took place here may be long gone, but these walls have not forgotten.
It seems like Bucky hasn’t forgotten, either. There is pure venom in his eyes as he takes point, his movements and posturing a strange blend of prey animal and apex predator. He is on hyper high alert, eyes constantly flitting around to survey his surroundings, and even as he stalks forward, he makes sure to keep enough weight on his back leg to be able to spring backwards at a moment’s notice should he encounter a threat. The rest of his body language, however, is all hunter. He grips his HK416 in steady, unwavering hands, and the expression on his face is one of terrifying resolve – the almost feral look of a former captive so furiously in love with his newfound freedom that he wouldn’t hesitate to kill anyone who threatened it, and failing that, would rather die than be taken prisoner again.
It’s a look of such indomitable self-determination that Sam almost forgets this is the same person who just days ago had been curling in on himself in submission on Sam’s living room couch as he offered his body as payment for Sam’s silence.
At the end of a short corridor, they reach a reinforced steel door that Bucky burns through with one of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s ridiculously overpowered blow torches.
“Stay out here, eyes forward,” Bucky says gruffly to Sam and Steve as he shoulders his way past them, but not before Sam is able to peek in and catch a glimpse of what’s behind the door.
It’s a cell, about six by eight feet, and Sam wishes he could say that he was horrified by how cramped and squalid a space it is, but truthfully it’s not that far off from the solitary confinement units in some American prisons.
Except for the bed.
It’s an ordinary foldable cot save for the heavy duty restraints attached to the frame, similar to the ones Steve had been fitted with in the back of the STRIKE van. In most of the other HYDRA locations they’d uncovered, the restraints were fixed to the wall; there’s really only one reason why they would be arranged on a bed like this, at the perfect distance for holding someone down spread-eagled on the mattress.
Sam realises he recognises this setup from one of the photos.
Bucky, tied down and helpless, someone between his legs and a second person at the head of the bed kneeling over his face to fuck his throat. Three or four other people waiting around for their turn.
Bucky must remember it, too, because the sound of automatic gunfire makes Sam and Steve jump and instinctively raise their own rifles until they realise that the shooting is coming from inside the cell, where Bucky is emptying an entire magazine into the bed.
FILL: between scylla and charybdis [6a/7-ish??? idk lol]
And yet here he is.
He’s still not quite sure he’d made the right decision by convincing Bucky to let him tag along. A part of him fears he’d been too manipulative in doing so, putting Bucky in a situation where he felt he couldn’t refuse, but he’s also clinging to the faint possibility that Bucky’s lack of resistance towards Sam’s presence indicates at least a subconscious desire to have someone around who is aware of his true situation, even if Sam couldn’t possibly actually understand it.
This car ride is the longest that Sam has seen Steve and Bucky interacting together and the atmosphere is far lighter than he’d expected, with Bucky and Steve caught in a competition of who can tell Sam the most embarrassing story about the other (Sam finds himself partial to the one about Steve trying to look cool in front of a bunch of other kids by trying to spit like a professional baseball player and ending up with a hell of a loogie dangling attractively from his chin).
It all seems to be going so smoothly that Sam feels guilty for being on high alert for any indication that things are about to go south. Maybe he’d pegged this situation all wrong after all. Maybe Steve was right, that he was only seeing signs of damage in Bucky because that’s what he’d expected to see, which means that Bucky was also right about Sam preventing him from being able to be okay by treating him as if he was supposed to be behaving in a certain way.
They make it to Pittsburgh in good time, where Bucky tracks down a former HYDRA officer in the suburb of South Fayette. He makes Sam and Steve wait in the car while he questions the man atop an abandoned building. Sam fully expects the interrogation to end with the sound of a single gunshot or perhaps the sick thud of a body hitting pavement, but then the man reappears before Bucky does, scurrying away, the very picture of a dog with its tail between its legs, and Bucky returns to the car without a word.
Things are a little tenser after that, as if this first stop has reminded them all that they’re not exactly on this road trip for the sight seeing, and by the time they stop off at a motel in Dover, Ohio late that night, Sam has never been more ready to hit the hay.
He tries to book his own room, but Steve insists that the three of them will be fine in one room with two double beds because he and Bucky can share.
“It’ll be just like when we were kids,” he says to Bucky with a warm smile.
Bucky returns the expression almost flawlessly and replies, “Better than putting the couch cushions on the floor, I guess,” but the moment Steve looks away, Sam notices Bucky’s chest starting to heave as his breathing picks up.
When they reach their room, Steve immediately flops down onto one of the beds and lets out a contented sigh. Both Sam and Bucky remain standing, and Bucky’s gotten his breathing back under control, but in a too-controlled, overly deliberate way that suggests it’s taking all of his willpower to do so.
“Hey, uh,” Sam says, “Maybe... maybe the guy with the deadly metal arm should get his own bed...?”
Bucky immediately whirls around to glare at him.
“It’s fine,” he growls.
Steve frowns. “Y’know, maybe Sam has a point... You were never exactly a sound sleeper, and I’m not really looking to get that fist in my face again.”
Sam nearly sags with relief; Bucky would never have accepted an out from Sam, but now that Steve himself has given one, there shouldn’t be a problem, right?
Except Bucky has raised his head defiantly, eyes narrowed and jaw set, and he’s saying, “I sleep like a log now. It’ll be fine.”
Sam shoots him a look of confused disapproval, no longer caring what Steve thinks of his reactions. They’d handed Bucky the perfect excuse to keep to himself – why the hell isn’t he taking it? The only reason Sam can come up with is that Bucky is trying to prove something – to him, to himself, to Steve - but he can’t imagine it’s worth it.
Steve must interpret Sam’s expression as concern for him, because he says, “Don’t worry, Sam; he’s right. I don’t hear a peep out of him at night anymore.”
Bucky bares his teeth at Sam in a triumphant smirk as he makes his way over to the bed and settles down next to Steve, and not for the first time Sam feels himself becoming frustrated with Bucky’s stubbornness. (Also not for the first time, he hates himself for it.) He knows it’s not Bucky’s fault, and he understands one hundred percent where Bucky is coming from, but that doesn’t make it any less maddening.
He tries to remind himself that this isn’t his problem anymore – that it never really was because Bucky never asked him for his help.
Then again, such a request rarely ever expresses itself in words. Where would Sam be without the people who’d seen his desperate actions for what they subconsciously were? The people who he’d initially viewed as a threat and whose concern he’d resentfully interpreted as a totally uncalled for encroachment upon his privacy? Sam may not have directly reached out to anyone, but he’s only where he is today because of the one or two hands that never withdrew no matter how many times he’d swatted them away, so he’ll be damned if he doesn’t do the same right now.
He heaves a weary sigh, climbing into his own bed and laying down facing the wall, which he stares at until it doesn’t make sense anymore.
+
He wakes up the following morning after a surprisingly uninterrupted sleep to find that it’s just him and Bucky in the room.
“Where’s Steve?” he asks Bucky, who’s sitting in the armchair watching the television, which is on mute.
“Getting breakfast,” Bucky replies without looking away from the screen.
He looks fucking exhausted. Sam wonders if he slept at all, or if this is just the way he normally looks when Steve isn’t around forcing a performance out of him.
“Look, I’m sorry about yesterday,” Sam says awkwardly. “About... the beds.”
It takes Bucky so long to respond that Sam starts to think he hadn’t heard him despite there being no other sounds in the room, but after maybe thirty seconds or so, he turns off the television and finally looks Sam in the eye.
Sam braces himself for an outburst of some kind, but all Bucky says is, “It’s okay.”
“...It is?”
Bucky shrugs, seeming to hunch in on himself slightly. “I get what you’re trying to do. But I can handle this.” He sees Sam start to open his mouth and cuts him off with a faint grin. “No, I actually mean it this time. It wasn’t– I was... scared... at first, but it wasn’t... It was okay. I– I actually kinda liked it. Being close to Steve.”
Sam nods thoughtfully, feeling a lot lighter all of a sudden, though also slightly guilty for once again having assumed that Bucky was going to react a certain way.
“He’s the one good thing,” Bucky mumbles after a moment, so quietly that Sam nearly misses it. “I know you think I can’t tell the difference between people who will hurt me and people who won’t, but I can. But only... only with Steve. It’s only Steve. That’s why he can’t...” He trails off abruptly, as if realising he’s shared way more than he meant to, then says with considerable finality, “It’s only Steve.”
Sam swallows hard. He desperately wants to explain to Bucky, somehow, that Steve isn’t the only person in the world who won’t hurt him, but he doesn’t want to push him too hard. Besides, this new revelation is still more than Sam would have expected, and it lends him a certain amount of hope for the future, because if Bucky can already recognise Steve as a safe person, then that’s one less hurdle they have to cross, and a damn huge one, too.
On the other hand, this could very well be the primary cause behind Bucky’s reluctance to let Steve in on what he’s truly going through. Sam remembers only too well the guilt and humiliation that drove him to keep his troubles hidden from his loved ones when he was at his lowest, not wanting to worry them or have them think any less of him, and that was even without the compounded shame of sexual trauma or the added burden of both having only one person who knew who you were before as well as being that one person to someone else.
“You’re his best friend, Bucky,” Sam says softly, cautiously. “Nothing could ever change that.”
Bucky sucks in a quivering breath and it seems as though he might speak again, but then the door is creaking open because Steve has apparently chosen this exact moment to come bustling in carrying two bags of admittedly delicious-smelling takeout from IHOP.
Bucky’s demeanour immediately changes. He slaps on a smile and slouches down a little in his chair to appear more relaxed. It all leaves Sam feeling a little sick inside but the pancakes still taste really good.
+
They continue eastward.
The dynamic between Steve and Bucky has shifted ever so slightly since that first night, as if sharing the bed had opened up the doors to a whole new level of interaction. They touch each other a lot more, and while it is pretty evenly split in terms of which one of them initiates contact, Sam has noticed that Bucky fares a lot better when he is the one to do so. He seems to genuinely enjoy touching Steve – a playful shove on the shoulder, a steadying hand at the small of his back – but whenever it’s the other way around, with Steve reaching towards Bucky, there’s always a split-second of panicked tension that seizes Bucky’s body before he’s able to get himself under control again. He’s caught in a heartbreaking tug of war between two opposing instincts – desperate for touch that does not hurt, but not yet fully able to believe such a thing exists.
Sam wishes there were a way to communicate this to Steve, because it seems like this whole issue of physical contact is a bit of a double-edged sword. Bucky is quite obviously touch-starved, but the days when Steve makes the first move too often are ones when Bucky is tense and closed-off and interrogations end in a gunshot.
To Steve’s credit, he does eventually take notice. He initiates contact less and less, instead waiting for Bucky to come to him, watching him with a cautious eye, though he’s given no indication that he’s come anywhere close to suspecting the true reason behind Bucky’s behaviour.
The secret stays nestled in Sam’s throat like a seething, shrieking stone.
+
At first it looks like the trip really is doing Bucky some good, but as they approach the one week mark on the road, it starts to seem less and less so. He’s becoming increasingly careless, sloppy, savage. The hours on the road are uncomfortably consumed by his silent, deadly focus instead of the cheery banter from before, and Steve and Sam find themselves having to clean up after him when he leaves too much of a bloody mess behind and can’t be bothered to cover up his tracks.
He has a flashback in a motel room on the outskirts of Tulsa, a quiet but terrifying ordeal that has him huddled up in a corner, murmuring feverishly in Russian and occasionally pushing out with his metal arm as if trying to fend off some invisible attacker. He doesn’t respond to any of Steve’s quiet pleas or Sam’s attempts to ground him. It lasts under ten minutes, but he comes out of it completely and totally exhausted and thankfully falls asleep not too long afterwards.
“Please stop,” Steve says faintly.
“What?” Sam asks with a raised eyebrow. He hadn’t been doing anything.
Steve jerks, like he’d forgotten Sam was there.
“‘Please stop,’” Steve repeats. “That’s– I don’t know a lot of Russian, but that...”
He trails off and lets the full weight of the implication sink in. The expression he’s fixed Sam with is equal parts dread-filled and expectant, as if he’s preparing himself for Sam to reveal something to him, but Sam just looks away and doesn’t say a word.
They let Bucky have his own bed that night.
+
After that, Bucky abruptly changes their travel plan to completely bypass Oklahoma City in favour of heading straight for a small mountain range in southeast Colorado. He says it contains an old HYDRA holding cell that was specifically tailored to house the Winter Soldier when he wasn’t in cryo, and Steve pales visibly when he hears that, but then his features go blank and hard as he braces himself for whatever latest horror they’re about to see.
It’s an hour long climb to a plateau on the north face of the mountain. It doesn’t look like much until Bucky removes a chunk of stone to reveal a number pad and punches in an eight-digit code, causing the rock wall to open up into a crude cave-like hideout. Though it appears to be long-abandoned, the stench of sickness, terror and death remains startlingly detectable in the musty air. The people responsible for the atrocities that took place here may be long gone, but these walls have not forgotten.
It seems like Bucky hasn’t forgotten, either. There is pure venom in his eyes as he takes point, his movements and posturing a strange blend of prey animal and apex predator. He is on hyper high alert, eyes constantly flitting around to survey his surroundings, and even as he stalks forward, he makes sure to keep enough weight on his back leg to be able to spring backwards at a moment’s notice should he encounter a threat. The rest of his body language, however, is all hunter. He grips his HK416 in steady, unwavering hands, and the expression on his face is one of terrifying resolve – the almost feral look of a former captive so furiously in love with his newfound freedom that he wouldn’t hesitate to kill anyone who threatened it, and failing that, would rather die than be taken prisoner again.
It’s a look of such indomitable self-determination that Sam almost forgets this is the same person who just days ago had been curling in on himself in submission on Sam’s living room couch as he offered his body as payment for Sam’s silence.
At the end of a short corridor, they reach a reinforced steel door that Bucky burns through with one of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s ridiculously overpowered blow torches.
“Stay out here, eyes forward,” Bucky says gruffly to Sam and Steve as he shoulders his way past them, but not before Sam is able to peek in and catch a glimpse of what’s behind the door.
It’s a cell, about six by eight feet, and Sam wishes he could say that he was horrified by how cramped and squalid a space it is, but truthfully it’s not that far off from the solitary confinement units in some American prisons.
Except for the bed.
It’s an ordinary foldable cot save for the heavy duty restraints attached to the frame, similar to the ones Steve had been fitted with in the back of the STRIKE van. In most of the other HYDRA locations they’d uncovered, the restraints were fixed to the wall; there’s really only one reason why they would be arranged on a bed like this, at the perfect distance for holding someone down spread-eagled on the mattress.
Sam realises he recognises this setup from one of the photos.
Bucky, tied down and helpless, someone between his legs and a second person at the head of the bed kneeling over his face to fuck his throat. Three or four other people waiting around for their turn.
Bucky must remember it, too, because the sound of automatic gunfire makes Sam and Steve jump and instinctively raise their own rifles until they realise that the shooting is coming from inside the cell, where Bucky is emptying an entire magazine into the bed.