“Oh, don’t worry too much, soldier,” drawls a cultured tenor voice with a trace of an accent Sam can’t place. “Mr. Wilson has only replaced you in Captain America’s affections, not ours.”
“Nah, he can’t replace me, I’ve got the childhood blackmail material.” The chatback comes a little slow, almost hesitant, like Bucky’s trying out something brand new, and it earns him a boot to the ribs and a rustle of background noise.
“Share or I’ll cut your pancake ration,” Sam says.
“Nope.” There’s something profoundly smug about how he wraps his bruised lips around the o, and Sam can catch a hiss of whispers between the men holding him.
“Thought he wasn’t allowed to say no.”
“Grow a brain, man, he’s not saying no to us.”
Sam wrinkles his nose, tests his cuffs for the hundredth time, pushes through his nerves, and cases the place. One exit, dismal concrete walls, bank of fluorescent lights in the ceiling, one each of steel table and chair and cabinet, drain in the floor. If you could call central casting for gutted interrogation rooms, he’s pretty sure this is what you’d get. Two guys holding him, two guys holding Bucky, all of them sporting earpieces and assorted hardware. Another guy holding up the wall, assault rifle in hand, pointed vaguely in Bucky’s direction. One last on a camp stool, the only other seating in the room, a bland-looking white guy in his forties in a slightly rumpled and bloodied suit with a shoulder holster peeking out, holding something black plastic and smartphone-sized in one hand and a pair of pliers that drip red in the other.
Suddenly the bloody spots scattered along Bucky’s body come into unpleasant focus, and Sam aggressively shelves his immediate concerns of infection risks and reminds himself that supersoldiers regrow skin disturbingly well. It had been two lefts and a right to get here from the entrance, and Sam couldn’t recall hearing anyone else for at least the last forty paces, so there’s that. If they get an opening and can clear the room, they should have a moment to breathe before pushing out. Assuming the cavalry doesn’t get here first. And there will be cavalry; Sam can’t afford to think otherwise. That got him through the Raft. This’ll probably be worse. Same principle. There is officially too much torture in Sam’s life these days if he’s developing principles about it.
“I see you two get along as well as we’ve observed,” the guy in the suit adds. He has a Hydra lapel pin and seems to be both in charge and obnoxiously pretentious. Sam immediately decides that his name is Mr. Burns.
“Your new friend talks too much,” he points out to Bucky.
“Yeah, well, he just got promoted, you know how smug some guys get.” Bucky gives a rolling shrug which jostles the collar a little, and is maybe also a test for the two guys holding his arm. Unfortunately it’s a test which gets him a gun barrel grinding into his temple, which barely gets a reaction out of him. Sam, on the other hand, has to clench his jaw against a stab of fear. He is not gonna watch Bucky get himself shot before they get out of here. Not before they can have a proper pie bake-off. None of these assholes even have any trigger discipline to speak of—they keep waving guns around like this and they’re going to shoot their prize assassin by accident, and he’d be happy to present them the Darwin Award personally if it wasn’t Bucky.
“Soldier,” Mr. Burns says, a little sharply.
Bucky lolls, eyes wandering over the room.
“Soldier.” Mr. Burns lifts up the plastic thing he’s holding, and his thumb twitches with a faint click, and then Bucky’s collar lights up with a hissing crackle of blue. Bucky screams, raw, animal, shameless. It takes him full-body like a grand-mal seizure, thrashing like a puppet on one strung arm, so violently that Sam worries he’ll dislocate his shoulder. Feels his mouth twist, sickened, forces himself to watch calmly because freaking out isn’t going to do Bucky a damn bit of good.
“Bring him here,” Mr. Burns says, when he turns the wretched thing back off, and Bucky’s nerveless in their arms, bare legs scraping against the concrete as they drag him, too busy taking great heaving breaths and shaking in the wake of it. They pin him down on his knees at chief asshole’s feet, in profile to where Sam’s stuck, and Mr. Burns takes him by the hair almost tenderly to turn his face towards Sam for a long moment. “Do you remember, soldier, the punishments for lying?”
Watching that sink in is, honestly, way worse than watching the shock collar. It’s like cracks all the way down to the bottom. Sam had never quite realized how damn expressive his face could be—he must be holding so much back, day in and day out. They didn’t flatten his affect at all. Instead he looks naked, transparent, because they fucked him over so profoundly that he doesn’t get to hold back a single shred of his mind from them, and Sam is fresh out of sass and feels his face twist in disgust as he rattles against the guys holding him down. Gets a few blows to the head for his trouble, and barely even notices them, because the despair dripping into Bucky’s eyes is worse.
Mr. Burns takes him by the chin to turn his face back, up, studying him, and he goes docile and broken with a nudge of his knuckle, and Sam burns with homicidal rage. “Good boy. Don’t forget. So tell me, truly, from the bottom of your heart. What would you like us to do to him?”
After Every Hit... [2/?]
“Nah, he can’t replace me, I’ve got the childhood blackmail material.” The chatback comes a little slow, almost hesitant, like Bucky’s trying out something brand new, and it earns him a boot to the ribs and a rustle of background noise.
“Share or I’ll cut your pancake ration,” Sam says.
“Nope.” There’s something profoundly smug about how he wraps his bruised lips around the o, and Sam can catch a hiss of whispers between the men holding him.
“Thought he wasn’t allowed to say no.”
“Grow a brain, man, he’s not saying no to us.”
Sam wrinkles his nose, tests his cuffs for the hundredth time, pushes through his nerves, and cases the place. One exit, dismal concrete walls, bank of fluorescent lights in the ceiling, one each of steel table and chair and cabinet, drain in the floor. If you could call central casting for gutted interrogation rooms, he’s pretty sure this is what you’d get. Two guys holding him, two guys holding Bucky, all of them sporting earpieces and assorted hardware. Another guy holding up the wall, assault rifle in hand, pointed vaguely in Bucky’s direction. One last on a camp stool, the only other seating in the room, a bland-looking white guy in his forties in a slightly rumpled and bloodied suit with a shoulder holster peeking out, holding something black plastic and smartphone-sized in one hand and a pair of pliers that drip red in the other.
Suddenly the bloody spots scattered along Bucky’s body come into unpleasant focus, and Sam aggressively shelves his immediate concerns of infection risks and reminds himself that supersoldiers regrow skin disturbingly well. It had been two lefts and a right to get here from the entrance, and Sam couldn’t recall hearing anyone else for at least the last forty paces, so there’s that. If they get an opening and can clear the room, they should have a moment to breathe before pushing out. Assuming the cavalry doesn’t get here first. And there will be cavalry; Sam can’t afford to think otherwise. That got him through the Raft. This’ll probably be worse. Same principle. There is officially too much torture in Sam’s life these days if he’s developing principles about it.
“I see you two get along as well as we’ve observed,” the guy in the suit adds. He has a Hydra lapel pin and seems to be both in charge and obnoxiously pretentious. Sam immediately decides that his name is Mr. Burns.
“Your new friend talks too much,” he points out to Bucky.
“Yeah, well, he just got promoted, you know how smug some guys get.” Bucky gives a rolling shrug which jostles the collar a little, and is maybe also a test for the two guys holding his arm. Unfortunately it’s a test which gets him a gun barrel grinding into his temple, which barely gets a reaction out of him. Sam, on the other hand, has to clench his jaw against a stab of fear. He is not gonna watch Bucky get himself shot before they get out of here. Not before they can have a proper pie bake-off. None of these assholes even have any trigger discipline to speak of—they keep waving guns around like this and they’re going to shoot their prize assassin by accident, and he’d be happy to present them the Darwin Award personally if it wasn’t Bucky.
“Soldier,” Mr. Burns says, a little sharply.
Bucky lolls, eyes wandering over the room.
“Soldier.” Mr. Burns lifts up the plastic thing he’s holding, and his thumb twitches with a faint click, and then Bucky’s collar lights up with a hissing crackle of blue. Bucky screams, raw, animal, shameless. It takes him full-body like a grand-mal seizure, thrashing like a puppet on one strung arm, so violently that Sam worries he’ll dislocate his shoulder. Feels his mouth twist, sickened, forces himself to watch calmly because freaking out isn’t going to do Bucky a damn bit of good.
“Bring him here,” Mr. Burns says, when he turns the wretched thing back off, and Bucky’s nerveless in their arms, bare legs scraping against the concrete as they drag him, too busy taking great heaving breaths and shaking in the wake of it. They pin him down on his knees at chief asshole’s feet, in profile to where Sam’s stuck, and Mr. Burns takes him by the hair almost tenderly to turn his face towards Sam for a long moment. “Do you remember, soldier, the punishments for lying?”
Watching that sink in is, honestly, way worse than watching the shock collar. It’s like cracks all the way down to the bottom. Sam had never quite realized how damn expressive his face could be—he must be holding so much back, day in and day out. They didn’t flatten his affect at all. Instead he looks naked, transparent, because they fucked him over so profoundly that he doesn’t get to hold back a single shred of his mind from them, and Sam is fresh out of sass and feels his face twist in disgust as he rattles against the guys holding him down. Gets a few blows to the head for his trouble, and barely even notices them, because the despair dripping into Bucky’s eyes is worse.
Mr. Burns takes him by the chin to turn his face back, up, studying him, and he goes docile and broken with a nudge of his knuckle, and Sam burns with homicidal rage. “Good boy. Don’t forget. So tell me, truly, from the bottom of your heart. What would you like us to do to him?”