Steve could hear soft, infrequent chatter in his earpiece from Sam and Natasha as they roved the perimeter of the Wakandan shield-barrier. They’d been lucky so far and had managed to keep Vision’s location a secret; now it was time to scatter those who knew that secret so Thanos couldn’t get at any of them. Sam would stay with the Wakandan army while Vision and Wanda were being generously sheltered in the Royal Palace. Sam could disappear into Wakanda’s ranks if he had to; Natasha, Steve, and Bucky stood out like sore thumbs. Natasha would make her own way out tomorrow, while Steve and Bucky were flying out now. With Tony gone, the remaining Avengers had to play things very smart. Thanos had resources they couldn’t even guess, and with every Infinity Stone, he became exponentially more dangerous.
The Obsidian Order had lost track of them when they’d left Europe, and now Steve and Bucky would temporarily play bait. With a small beacon on board that would randomly emit bursts of the energy signature that Thanos and his “children” had been looking for, with any luck they could keep him distracted and away from Wakanda. Long enough for Princess Shuri to find some way of separating Vision from the Mind Stone without killing him…
Bucky had been grim-faced at the news that interstellar war might come to touch the one place he’d found some kind of peace since before he’d shipped out in 1943. “That ain’t happening, Steve. Not here. Not anywhere else. Not now.” And he’d gone with Steve. He’d accepted a new left arm, product of Wakanda’s labs, a new armored suit suited to his style, and taken Nat’s favorite rifle, “for business purposes” with her blessing.
Even in the midst of this high-stakes game of chess, Steve still had a thrill in having Bucky around so close. Skype sessions did a lot to keep them connected and help fill in the gaps, and they’d been talking nearly daily since he’d finally been awoken from cryo with a mind that was no longer subject to Hydra’s control. They’d poured out a river of words between them, anecdotes and old stories, commiseration on new-fangled weirdness (and wonder), painful sharing of secrets so they could never be used against them, and tentative tender words that Steve felt privileged to speak and to hear. They hadn’t been able to get much farther than words, even in the short times Steve could get away to Wakanda, but that was enough. They had time to work through all they had been through.
The sounds from Steve’s earpiece faded slightly, and he signed off as he directed the Quinjet westward. In a few hours they’d start their bait broadcasting, keeping moving to keep Thanos guessing. Once they had word that the Mind Stone was safe, they’d drop the beacon in a remote area and hopefully lure Thanos to where the Avengers could confront him without danger to anyone else.
Steve hoped that would be enough. Tony was gone. Clint wasn’t answering anyone’s calls. Scott couldn’t leave his house. He didn’t dare ask anyone else to risk themselves against such a foe.
Hours later, over a barren stretch of desert, Steve turned on the beacon. It hadn’t begun to ping for more than a moment when suddenly there was a flash of blue, then red, and abruptly the Quinjet was on the ground with Thanos was in the open drop door. Steve’s heart was pounding nearly out of his chest with adrenaline and fear, but he snatched up his shields as Bucky grabbed his gun, both of them ready to do everything they could do slow the mad titan down.
Thanos regarded both of them with calm, the gauntlet on his hand sparkling with blue, red, green, and purple gems. Steve was used to angry enemies, to arrogant ones, but not one who was so self-assured of his success that he didn’t need to show his passion. That was perhaps the most frightening thing of all.
“An amusing ruse,” he said. Bucky raised his gun and fired off a shockingly loud stream of lead at Thanos, who raised his gauntlet and seemingly absorbed the bullets into a shield of multi-hued light. When Bucky’s clip ran dry, Steve was there the second Thanos dropped the shield, ready to strike with vibranium shields at Thanos’ face, his gauntlet, trying to distract and disarm him in the wake of Bucky’s attack. The hits were solid, but Steve felt like he was hitting concrete. Thanos was moved slightly, but grimaced and twisted his hand. Purple light pulsed, and both Steve and Bucky were tossed to the ground like rag dolls.
“Where is the Mind Stone?” he asked almost casually. “We don’t have to make this any harder than it has to be.”
Steve got up, sliding across the sand-strewn metal decking to kick out at Thanos’ knees to topple him, Bucky following in his wake to batter at his head and arm with his metal fist. Again and again, they fought and were thrown back, rose up and tried again, knowing Thanos was toying with them, and still unable to stop.
When Thanos’ last attack left Bucky gasping and Steve dizzy with exhaustion, Thanos twisted his hand again, and red and green power pulsed, wiping over the landscape.
“I have waited long enough, but I can wait a little more. I need the answer from you. And I’m tired of this futility. We’ll try something else.”
Reality reformed in a sweep of power, leaving Steve in a nightmare. He was standing alone in a doorless room on one side of a one-way mirror, observing a bare concrete room with its single light bulb and drain in the middle of the sloping floor. Bucky was sprawled across the floor as if tossed there, naked, his weapons missing, his metal arm no longer matte black and gold, but the shimmering silver with the red star that had been Hydra’s brand on him.
Steve didn’t even have time to move before the door into Bucky’s room slammed open, and a stream of STRIKE soldiers came striding through, all swagger and arrogant smirks. The bottom dropped out of Steve’s stomach as he sickeningly recognized this whole scenario from Bucky’s broken, hesitant descriptions of his time in Hydra’s hands. Thanos had brought them back to a time when the Winter Soldier had been punished; the exact time or for what reason, he didn’t know, and Bucky didn’t recall. It wouldn’t have mattered to STRIKE; in the last ten years the Asset had become increasingly more difficult to control, and they had been encouraged to use extreme methods to keep him compliant. Amongst the lean, muscled, swaggering soldiers, Steve recognized Rollins, Rumlow, Thorn, Lopez, Gorgio, and others. People he’d fought besides, people who he thought had had his back. People who had been casually torturing a prisoner of war for years.
Thanos was nowhere in sight, so Steve wasted no time in throwing himself at the glass, battering it with hands and arms bereft of the shields Shuri had made for him, kicking at it with feet clad in running shoes, not the boots of his armor. He was wearing civilian clothes, in a bare room with no door, and nothing he did made the slightest crack or even smudged the surface of the glass.
He didn’t know which of the Infinity Stones were creating this nightmare. Bruce was the only one who knew much about them, and he’d only gotten the briefest of explanations from a sorcerer in New York before he’d been forced to run to Steve. Before Tony had been taken. There had been little else to tell other than their colors, natures, and a hint of their origin. The reality stone had warped the desert around them, the space stone had brought Thanos to them, the power stone made him nearly impossible to hurt, and the time stone… With the time stone, Thanos could have reached back and brought them both here.
The STRIKE soldiers arranged themselves around Bucky’s huddled, crumpled form, their expressions filled with anticipation and twisted with cruelty. One kicked him, his foot landing with a meaty thud, and Bucky moaned. That only seemed to encourage the others, and suddenly there was a melee of kicking and stomping feet, hands grasping at Bucky’s arms, shoulders, or hair just long enough for Steve to catch a small glimpse before someone would punch him back down.
Steve shouted, “Bucky! Get away from him, you bastards!” He punctuated every word with useless strikes at the impenetrable glass, beating against it futilely until the circle of STRIKE soldiers opened up. Rumlow had grabbed Bucky’s hair and hauled him up to his knees, turning him to the mirrored glass. Bucky’s body was littered with quickly-healing bootprints and bruises, and trickles of blood were smeared on his face from where knuckles had broken the skin, cut through with tears. His chest was heaving as he tried to regain his breath, and his eyes were strangely dilated. Then Steve saw Bucky avert his eyes, a flush of shame staining his face, neck, and chest. Steve’s eyes roved down and saw the floor was spattered with globs of white fluid, and more marked Bucky’s thighs. His cock was rapidly becoming hard again after having just come after being beaten.
Rumlow twisted his fist in Bucky’s hair, and Bucky’s cock leapt to attention, tip beading with moisture, and his mouth dropped open in a moan that wasn’t from pain.
Steve felt his face go pale and heard a roaring in his ears when he realized what was happening.
--
“They would start off just beating me up. ‘Getting the meat tender,’ was what Rollins called it. Then they’d… Get their pants off. I had to take care of them all. If I stopped, more pain. If I gagged, they’d go to level two. Then three. And more. Until I stopped refusing.”
That had been the only time Bucky had come out and said what Hydra’s soldiers had done to him. But Steve had learned far more from Bucky’s reactions. Although the scientists of Wakanda had been able to rid Bucky’s mind of its Hydra programming, they couldn’t rid him of decades’ worth of trauma and its aftermath. Spending a leisurely afternoon leaning against Steve on the riverbank was calming and pleasant. But in the evening, by mutual agreement lying down in the same bed, Steve had gone to comfortingly spoon Bucky from behind and had nearly had his jaw broken by his triggered response. Kissing and gentle touches were all right, but sometimes cupping Bucky’s jaw or some other seemingly harmless touch would trigger a bad response, some ingrained reaction to expected cruelty.
He’d never seen Bucky hard, and after a while, stopped expecting it. Hydra had done so many horrible things to him without even directly manipulating his mind, and not even the best scientists on the planet could excise those memories. Bucky couldn’t make himself relax and let go, not even for Steve, no matter how much he loved him. They made it work as best they could, Bucky accepting what platonic touches he could with relief, and even getting some pink-cheeked enjoyment from watching Steve touch himself.
Steve slowed down, eking out the last few pulses of his orgasm as he finally opened his eyes. Bucky was sitting a few feet away on the bed, all his clothes still on, mouth open slightly, eyes fixed on Steve’s chest as his breathing slowed down. His gaze slowly traveled up to Steve’s eyes, and Bucky smiled.
“God, you look good, Steve.” Steve wanted to reach for him, wanted to make Bucky feel as good as he was feeling, wanted him to be able to reclaim that part of himself, but didn’t. He’d already tried, and that time Bucky had closed up, his body language growing cold, even leaving the room. The single time Bucky had tried to just lie on top of Steve with only their boxers between them, Bucky had nearly had a full-blown panic attack. No. This had to happen on Bucky’s time, or it never would; Steve respected that.
--
Hydra had hurt Bucky so deeply that they had twisted not just pain, but most touch and human contact into red-hot trauma and branded them into his nerves. And now Bucky was harder than Steve had ever seen him in this century, moaning in wanton pleasure as some version of Brock Rumlow held him up by the hair.
“No!” Steve yelled, pounding uselessly on the unbreakable glass.
Rumlow only smirked, like he could hear him, and opened his pants. Without preamble, he lowered Bucky’s head onto his erection and began to brutally fuck into his mouth, holding onto Bucky’s long hair as if they were handles. Rollins bent down to pick up Bucky’s hips, and both men went to their knees so Rumlow could keep up his brutal assault on Bucky’s mouth. Rollins considered Bucky’s ass for a moment, large hands digging into the muscle there, before spitting on his dick, lining it up, and ramming himself deep into Bucky.
[FILL] The King Dies By the Crown 1/2
The Obsidian Order had lost track of them when they’d left Europe, and now Steve and Bucky would temporarily play bait. With a small beacon on board that would randomly emit bursts of the energy signature that Thanos and his “children” had been looking for, with any luck they could keep him distracted and away from Wakanda. Long enough for Princess Shuri to find some way of separating Vision from the Mind Stone without killing him…
Bucky had been grim-faced at the news that interstellar war might come to touch the one place he’d found some kind of peace since before he’d shipped out in 1943. “That ain’t happening, Steve. Not here. Not anywhere else. Not now.” And he’d gone with Steve. He’d accepted a new left arm, product of Wakanda’s labs, a new armored suit suited to his style, and taken Nat’s favorite rifle, “for business purposes” with her blessing.
Even in the midst of this high-stakes game of chess, Steve still had a thrill in having Bucky around so close. Skype sessions did a lot to keep them connected and help fill in the gaps, and they’d been talking nearly daily since he’d finally been awoken from cryo with a mind that was no longer subject to Hydra’s control. They’d poured out a river of words between them, anecdotes and old stories, commiseration on new-fangled weirdness (and wonder), painful sharing of secrets so they could never be used against them, and tentative tender words that Steve felt privileged to speak and to hear. They hadn’t been able to get much farther than words, even in the short times Steve could get away to Wakanda, but that was enough. They had time to work through all they had been through.
The sounds from Steve’s earpiece faded slightly, and he signed off as he directed the Quinjet westward. In a few hours they’d start their bait broadcasting, keeping moving to keep Thanos guessing. Once they had word that the Mind Stone was safe, they’d drop the beacon in a remote area and hopefully lure Thanos to where the Avengers could confront him without danger to anyone else.
Steve hoped that would be enough. Tony was gone. Clint wasn’t answering anyone’s calls. Scott couldn’t leave his house. He didn’t dare ask anyone else to risk themselves against such a foe.
Hours later, over a barren stretch of desert, Steve turned on the beacon. It hadn’t begun to ping for more than a moment when suddenly there was a flash of blue, then red, and abruptly the Quinjet was on the ground with Thanos was in the open drop door. Steve’s heart was pounding nearly out of his chest with adrenaline and fear, but he snatched up his shields as Bucky grabbed his gun, both of them ready to do everything they could do slow the mad titan down.
Thanos regarded both of them with calm, the gauntlet on his hand sparkling with blue, red, green, and purple gems. Steve was used to angry enemies, to arrogant ones, but not one who was so self-assured of his success that he didn’t need to show his passion. That was perhaps the most frightening thing of all.
“An amusing ruse,” he said. Bucky raised his gun and fired off a shockingly loud stream of lead at Thanos, who raised his gauntlet and seemingly absorbed the bullets into a shield of multi-hued light. When Bucky’s clip ran dry, Steve was there the second Thanos dropped the shield, ready to strike with vibranium shields at Thanos’ face, his gauntlet, trying to distract and disarm him in the wake of Bucky’s attack. The hits were solid, but Steve felt like he was hitting concrete. Thanos was moved slightly, but grimaced and twisted his hand. Purple light pulsed, and both Steve and Bucky were tossed to the ground like rag dolls.
“Where is the Mind Stone?” he asked almost casually. “We don’t have to make this any harder than it has to be.”
Steve got up, sliding across the sand-strewn metal decking to kick out at Thanos’ knees to topple him, Bucky following in his wake to batter at his head and arm with his metal fist. Again and again, they fought and were thrown back, rose up and tried again, knowing Thanos was toying with them, and still unable to stop.
When Thanos’ last attack left Bucky gasping and Steve dizzy with exhaustion, Thanos twisted his hand again, and red and green power pulsed, wiping over the landscape.
“I have waited long enough, but I can wait a little more. I need the answer from you. And I’m tired of this futility. We’ll try something else.”
Reality reformed in a sweep of power, leaving Steve in a nightmare. He was standing alone in a doorless room on one side of a one-way mirror, observing a bare concrete room with its single light bulb and drain in the middle of the sloping floor. Bucky was sprawled across the floor as if tossed there, naked, his weapons missing, his metal arm no longer matte black and gold, but the shimmering silver with the red star that had been Hydra’s brand on him.
Steve didn’t even have time to move before the door into Bucky’s room slammed open, and a stream of STRIKE soldiers came striding through, all swagger and arrogant smirks. The bottom dropped out of Steve’s stomach as he sickeningly recognized this whole scenario from Bucky’s broken, hesitant descriptions of his time in Hydra’s hands. Thanos had brought them back to a time when the Winter Soldier had been punished; the exact time or for what reason, he didn’t know, and Bucky didn’t recall. It wouldn’t have mattered to STRIKE; in the last ten years the Asset had become increasingly more difficult to control, and they had been encouraged to use extreme methods to keep him compliant. Amongst the lean, muscled, swaggering soldiers, Steve recognized Rollins, Rumlow, Thorn, Lopez, Gorgio, and others. People he’d fought besides, people who he thought had had his back. People who had been casually torturing a prisoner of war for years.
Thanos was nowhere in sight, so Steve wasted no time in throwing himself at the glass, battering it with hands and arms bereft of the shields Shuri had made for him, kicking at it with feet clad in running shoes, not the boots of his armor. He was wearing civilian clothes, in a bare room with no door, and nothing he did made the slightest crack or even smudged the surface of the glass.
He didn’t know which of the Infinity Stones were creating this nightmare. Bruce was the only one who knew much about them, and he’d only gotten the briefest of explanations from a sorcerer in New York before he’d been forced to run to Steve. Before Tony had been taken. There had been little else to tell other than their colors, natures, and a hint of their origin. The reality stone had warped the desert around them, the space stone had brought Thanos to them, the power stone made him nearly impossible to hurt, and the time stone… With the time stone, Thanos could have reached back and brought them both here.
The STRIKE soldiers arranged themselves around Bucky’s huddled, crumpled form, their expressions filled with anticipation and twisted with cruelty. One kicked him, his foot landing with a meaty thud, and Bucky moaned. That only seemed to encourage the others, and suddenly there was a melee of kicking and stomping feet, hands grasping at Bucky’s arms, shoulders, or hair just long enough for Steve to catch a small glimpse before someone would punch him back down.
Steve shouted, “Bucky! Get away from him, you bastards!” He punctuated every word with useless strikes at the impenetrable glass, beating against it futilely until the circle of STRIKE soldiers opened up. Rumlow had grabbed Bucky’s hair and hauled him up to his knees, turning him to the mirrored glass. Bucky’s body was littered with quickly-healing bootprints and bruises, and trickles of blood were smeared on his face from where knuckles had broken the skin, cut through with tears. His chest was heaving as he tried to regain his breath, and his eyes were strangely dilated. Then Steve saw Bucky avert his eyes, a flush of shame staining his face, neck, and chest. Steve’s eyes roved down and saw the floor was spattered with globs of white fluid, and more marked Bucky’s thighs. His cock was rapidly becoming hard again after having just come after being beaten.
Rumlow twisted his fist in Bucky’s hair, and Bucky’s cock leapt to attention, tip beading with moisture, and his mouth dropped open in a moan that wasn’t from pain.
Steve felt his face go pale and heard a roaring in his ears when he realized what was happening.
--
“They would start off just beating me up. ‘Getting the meat tender,’ was what Rollins called it. Then they’d… Get their pants off. I had to take care of them all. If I stopped, more pain. If I gagged, they’d go to level two. Then three. And more. Until I stopped refusing.”
That had been the only time Bucky had come out and said what Hydra’s soldiers had done to him. But Steve had learned far more from Bucky’s reactions. Although the scientists of Wakanda had been able to rid Bucky’s mind of its Hydra programming, they couldn’t rid him of decades’ worth of trauma and its aftermath. Spending a leisurely afternoon leaning against Steve on the riverbank was calming and pleasant. But in the evening, by mutual agreement lying down in the same bed, Steve had gone to comfortingly spoon Bucky from behind and had nearly had his jaw broken by his triggered response. Kissing and gentle touches were all right, but sometimes cupping Bucky’s jaw or some other seemingly harmless touch would trigger a bad response, some ingrained reaction to expected cruelty.
He’d never seen Bucky hard, and after a while, stopped expecting it. Hydra had done so many horrible things to him without even directly manipulating his mind, and not even the best scientists on the planet could excise those memories. Bucky couldn’t make himself relax and let go, not even for Steve, no matter how much he loved him. They made it work as best they could, Bucky accepting what platonic touches he could with relief, and even getting some pink-cheeked enjoyment from watching Steve touch himself.
Steve slowed down, eking out the last few pulses of his orgasm as he finally opened his eyes. Bucky was sitting a few feet away on the bed, all his clothes still on, mouth open slightly, eyes fixed on Steve’s chest as his breathing slowed down. His gaze slowly traveled up to Steve’s eyes, and Bucky smiled.
“God, you look good, Steve.” Steve wanted to reach for him, wanted to make Bucky feel as good as he was feeling, wanted him to be able to reclaim that part of himself, but didn’t. He’d already tried, and that time Bucky had closed up, his body language growing cold, even leaving the room. The single time Bucky had tried to just lie on top of Steve with only their boxers between them, Bucky had nearly had a full-blown panic attack. No. This had to happen on Bucky’s time, or it never would; Steve respected that.
--
Hydra had hurt Bucky so deeply that they had twisted not just pain, but most touch and human contact into red-hot trauma and branded them into his nerves. And now Bucky was harder than Steve had ever seen him in this century, moaning in wanton pleasure as some version of Brock Rumlow held him up by the hair.
“No!” Steve yelled, pounding uselessly on the unbreakable glass.
Rumlow only smirked, like he could hear him, and opened his pants. Without preamble, he lowered Bucky’s head onto his erection and began to brutally fuck into his mouth, holding onto Bucky’s long hair as if they were handles. Rollins bent down to pick up Bucky’s hips, and both men went to their knees so Rumlow could keep up his brutal assault on Bucky’s mouth. Rollins considered Bucky’s ass for a moment, large hands digging into the muscle there, before spitting on his dick, lining it up, and ramming himself deep into Bucky.