For morethanashield

[disassembling]

Who: James "Winter Soldier" Barnes & Steve "Captain America" Rogers
When: Months after initial capture
What: AU - Both Steve and Bucky fell from the train. Both were captured and forced into service of HYDRA as their weapons to shape the world.
Warnings: Maybe violence?


The pain was momentarily numbed, though it would return along with his orientation of his surroundings now that the days experimentations were over. For the first time, he was stable enough to be moved from being trapped and monitored in the medical wing (he assumed it had a name though didn't know it) and shifted to the cells where only a guard was required to keep watch over numerous subjects in their small cages side-by-side. The room was kept colder than normal to prevent them from moving around much or thinking too hard about escaping.

His head was fuzzy and his vision wavered as he was settled down in the middle of his new cell. There were whispers (always were), but his head was too drained of anything to grasp onto any one detail. This was a test apparently. Perhaps to see if he could survive the rigors of the illusion of freedom in a small cold cage left to his own devices. They left, clicking the door shut with too much noise that he twitched where he lay.

At first he lay on his right side just drinking in the air, orienting himself on one aspect of his surroundings before adding another. He allowed his ears to focus next, the sounds of moaning prisoners, the mutter of a disgruntled cold guard making rounds, the shuffle of cold experiments trying to find that one warm place that didn't exist. His sense of touch was next, feeling the rough cement under his arm, and the cold wash of sensation from the left side of his body where heavy bandages covered some recent modification to where his arm should be. At last, he allowed his eyes to pick out things, but it was the current weakest of his senses, fallible and blurry as he dragged himself across the floor.

He didn't know where he was going, didn't know he was being watched keenly for what direction he chose to go when there were four options for him. One had no other prisoner, the other three did. He pulled himself towards the right, and though he didn't know it, towards where they were all very excited that he would go. To him. He nestled against the bars in the corner, breathing hard from the excursion but slowly curling up. There was a source of familiarity nearby. He chose to be close to it.

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[morethanashield]

He - the man was only a "he" now - had been removed from the medical wing a while ago. He couldn't remember how long, just that it was a while, and his memories of the straps and the operating table were as hazy as his memories of other places. That didn't mean he wasn't subjected still to frequent stints in the chair, quite the opposite. He needed the extra time, according to bits and pieces he snatched from the doctors and guards. It wouldn't stick otherwise. But he was tough, he could take it.

Whatever it was.

He knew that the shocks, when they came, scoured his mind and always left less behind, always left him less than he had been. That didn't mean he could do anything about it.

It had been a bad day, when his name had finally slipped away. He was pretty sure he remembered taking a guard's finger off when they'd tried to subdue him. "Scrappy", they called him. "Sometimes I think he likes getting punched."

The man was little more than a snarling dog, now, tearing into everyone and everything he could reach in a vain attempt to fully encompass the aching sense of loss inside him, all the worse for not knowing anymore all that he'd lost. HYDRA, however, was patiently working to point all that helpless rage in a productive direction.

He spent a lot of time in this cage when he wasn't running through drills. They kept him on a strict regime of military exercises, training, until he was too exhausted to stay standing and could thus be safely dragged back to this cage. They mostly kept him handcuffed, too, with at least one wrist to a bar. Long enough to allow for at least some movement, but not enough movement to reach through the bars of the opposite wall.

He'd woken up without his chains today. He didn't know why, but knew better than to ask. So Steve had been dozing off in one corner of the cage, when he started suddenly awake at the sound of the door next to his opening. He looked up to see a ragged form tossed carelessly inside. That should have been as far as the situation concerned him - he tended to treat the prisoners with reserved, almost anxious wariness, most days.

But something about this one...

Every muscle ached in protest as he moved, easing forward towards the other wall as the other man did. When the other moved to curl up against the bars, he felt a throb of something in his chest - pain, yes, even anguish, both emotions he was intimately familiar with.

But it had been a while since he'd let himself feel them for anyone else. He didn't know how long, exactly. Just that it had been a while.

He swallowed past a tightness in his throat, settling against the bars once more beside the man. Almost without thinking, he reached out with shaking fingers through the bars, as much as he could, to stroke gently at some of the tangled, matted hair.

"Hey." He barely recognized the sound of his own voice, especially when it wasn't raised in anger.