Chapter 2: Distractions
Chapter summary: Professionalism is never as easy in practice as it looks on paper.
Bucky didn't have a problem with needles, which was a good thing because an hour later Jemma returned with half a dozen of them. She administered them without incident and spent the rest of the day back in the lab analysing the scan results and mocking up design specs.
Good old lab No. 12. It had always been their favourite when they were stationed at the Hub before taking their assignment on the Bus—bright and airy, lovely big holotable in the middle of the room, conveniently close to the street level exit and therefore the Starbucks across the road—so it had only taken about two seconds for her and Fitz to decide to move back in while the Bus was undergoing repairs.
She was just putting the finishing touches on the schematic for the delta-ray emitter when her phone buzzed with a text from Fitz.
Thought I'd be done by now, these circuit boards hate me. Shouldn't be much longer.
It was already close to dinner time, but once Fitz arrived there wouldn't be much more work to do to have the device ready for tomorrow.
Jemma tapped out a quick reply—Impossible, you're unhatable. See you soon—then laced her fingers together behind her back and extended her arms in a stretch. Time for a cup of tea.
She went over to the corner of the lab where the tea fixings were kept (because tea was essential to science—to everything, really) and turned on the kettle. She found herself reflecting on the more dramatic parts of her day as she located a clean cup and popped a teabag in it.
There was no question she'd been properly terrified when Barnes had grabbed her by the throat, but there was also no question that he hadn't done it intentionally. She would have compared the look in his eyes right afterwards to a beaten puppy, except for the fact that his torment extended to much greater depths.
And yes, perhaps she'd been channelling May's bravery instead of her own when she gave her little 'you're not the first to threaten my life' speech, but she wasn't going to let Barnes' concern for her safety prevent him from getting the help he needed.
The kettle gave a dull click as it came to the boil and she poured the steaming water into the mug. She jiggled the teabag absently as she wandered over to the screen that displayed the security feed from the cell.
One of the advantages of the cell from a scientific perspective was that she could keep a close eye on her patient. In the interests of honesty and transparency she'd informed both men earlier in the day that she would be making intermittent and discreet use of the surveillance footage. There were multiple camera angles, all looking down from various corners of the room and giving her a clear full-colour live image.
Camera 1 showed Steve manoeuvring a mattress from crew quarters through the door of the cell. She hadn't realised he intended to sleep in there, but she supposed she wasn't really surprised. If she was in his position, and it was Fitz who'd been taken from her and returned again, she wouldn't let him out of her sight either.
It took her a little longer to find Bucky. She forgot all about jiggling the teabag in her cup when she spotted him on camera 3, dragging his shirt over his head and stepping into the shower cubicle.
Fortunately—unfortunately?—the camera angle only showed from the waist up, otherwise she would have shut off the feed immediately. Probably. Yes, yes, she definitely would have. Most likely.
As it was, she now found herself with an unfettered view of that glorious cybernetic arm, including the shoulder, which had been hidden from her view until now.
Sixty seconds, she told herself. She was just going to look for one minute, for science, and then she'd turn off the feed.
The jets of water bounced off the metal, making it even shinier than before. She recalled how it had felt under her fingers, smooth and cool, but somehow thrumming with life. She already knew about the painted red star from the patchy footage that had come out of the Triskelion attack. It was the seam with his skin, the interface between biology and technology, that she was most interested in.
The skin adjoining the metal was a network of crisscrossing scars, an ominous reminder that the scientists who attached the limb were more concerned with functionality and efficiency than the welfare of their patient. Those pale pink lines were a testament to the pain he must have endured. She hoped that was one of the memories that was still hidden, and that it would remain so.
She was hypothesizing about how the top of the arm was attached to his clavicle and scapula when her gaze drifted from the robotic limb to his muscular back and the water sluicing over it. He tipped his face up into the spray, the muscles of his torso rippling beneath tanned skin as he soaped up his chest, and the whole effect was more than a little hypnotic.
It had definitely been longer than a minute.
"Unprofessional, Jemma," she chided herself when she finally turned off the feed.
The tea in her mug was dark, but not unsalvageable. She fished the teabag out and threw it in the trash, then turned back to the huge holoprojection of Barnes' brain that was floating over the table.
As much as she wanted to monitor any emotional or aggressive outbursts via video, she also wanted to respect Bucky's privacy. From what she understood, it had been decades since he'd been treated with even the most basic level of human decency.
Sometimes she got a bit caught up in the science of a thing and forgot to respect the individual at the centre of it. She hoped her enthusiasm over his arm earlier in the day hadn't been interpreted as such. The last thing she wanted was to make him feel like a lab rat again.
She gave him a good thirty minutes to finish his shower and get dressed before turning the security feed back on. When she looked again, he was lying on the bed wearing only S.H.I.E.L.D.-issue black sweatpants, hands behind his head and well-defined torso on full display.
"Not helping, mister," she murmured idly as she admired the definition of his abdominal muscles. At least he seemed relaxed, which was the result she'd been aiming for with those injections.
"What's not helping?" asked Fitz, his gaze snagging on the giant translucent brain in the middle of the room as he came through the door.
"Fitz!" She mashed the button to shut off the feed. "You're here, good!" she said, recovering quickly, because she was smooth like that. "I need your help with something and you're never going to guess who it's for."
Bucky was sitting on the edge of the bed nursing a coffee when Jemma arrived the next morning.
"Glad to see you're making yourselves at home," she said, setting a tray of syringes down on the square white table Steve had pilfered from the staff quarters he'd been assigned. He'd also brought in two matching chairs, a few books, and the mattress he'd slept on, which was pushed into one corner. "Coulson will be glad to hear you're getting settled in."
Bucky might have put up a bit of a protest about Steve sleeping on the floor in the cell rather than off in some cushy room, except that the thought of facing his night terrors on his own left him feeling slightly nauseous.
Steve moved their breakfast dishes out of the way to make more space for Jemma's tray. For whatever fortuitous reason, Hydra hadn't bothered to infiltrate the catering contractors who ran the staff cafeteria, so the procedure was that Steve would go and pick up their meals three times a day.
"Good oatmeal this morning, wasn't it?" Jemma commented, and Steve nodded amiably.
"Just a shame about the coffee," Bucky said, lifting his mug slightly.
That got him a nose wrinkle of sympathy. "I hear you."
She picked up a small metallic disk, the only thing on the tray that wasn't a syringe, and held it up for him to see. "This is your very own personalised delta-ray emitter. No beeping, no flashing, and designed to be placed on the back of the neck," she said with a triumphant smile.
Bucky found himself returning the smile, or at least a heavily subdued version of it. Maybe because this was the closest he'd come to getting actual treatment since going AWOL on his captors, maybe because her enthusiasm was infectious, or maybe just because she was so damn cute.
No pink today, but somehow she managed to look just as young and innocent in black. Her hair was in soft waves around her face, a pretty frame to an even prettier picture.
"Shall we give it a go?" she asked, not that there was really any question.
Bucky stood up, turned around, and used the hand not holding his mug to move the hair away from the back of his neck. Steve stayed close as Jemma approached—no one wanted a repeat of yesterday—but it proved to be unnecessary.
Bucky felt the brush of her cool fingertips against the warm skin of his neck, and a gentle pressure as she applied the device, but nothing else.
"I don't feel anything," he said, letting his hair fall and turning back to face her.
"Good," she said matter-of-factly, "you shouldn't. We'll start with twenty minutes twice a day and see what memories we can shake loose in there."
"Is there anything we can do to help it along?" Steve asked, folding his arms.
"Talking," Jemma said, nodding. "Recounting memories you know are in there that haven't returned yet, try and get those synapses firing."
"Synapses?" Steve repeated, a glint in his eye. "That'd require brain cells. I don't like our chances."
Bucky was about to call him an asshole, but at the last second another word sprang to mind. "Punk."
The smile Steve gave the floor told Bucky everything he needed to know. This was something he'd done before, something he used to do.
"Jerk," Steve muttered through his smile, bumping Bucky's shoulder with his own before heading over to his mattress on the floor. He sat down, using the wall as a back rest, and picked up the novel he'd started the night before.
At first Bucky couldn't place the origin of the exchange, at least not beyond a general feeling that it was something that had happened on multiple occasions, but then some more specific images began to coalesce around the words.
Night time. A fair. The smell of roasted nuts, the dull roar of a meandering crowd. "The day I got my orders?"
"Among other times," said Steve, still smiling at his book like he was being warmed from the inside out, and damn did it feel good to see that expression on his face. Steve had been there for every delusional outburst, every nightmare, of the past week, sticking by a friend who barely even remembered him. It was more than a relief to see Steve feeling like he was getting back a bit of the guy he once knew.
"Steve from Ohio…" Bucky said, a smile creeping across his face.
"Steve from Ohio," Steve repeated, grinning.
"Looks like those delta rays are working already." Jemma was grinning too, though with the excitement of innovation instead of nostalgia.
Bucky put his mug on the corner of the table and sat back down on the bed. "You're a miracle worker, kitten," he said warmly, meeting her eyes. The endearment slipped out without him even thinking about it.
"Mr Barnes," Jemma said, turning back to her syringes and trying to hide her self-conscious smile, "that sort of language is hardly appropriate for the workplace."
He leaned back on his hands. "So you want me to stop, then?" he said, the corner of his mouth tucking up in a smirk.
"I didn't say that," she said, pink lips quirking as she held up a syringe filled with clear liquid and checked the dosage.
He let his smile grow wider, because this—flirting—felt familiar, like muscle memory. He could only imagine it was something he used to do a lot, and one look at Steve and his amused 'here we go' expression confirmed it.
The bloom of warmth in his gut from seeing that flattered smile on her face was like a drug, and in an instant a dozen pretty faces appeared behind his eyes, like he was skimming through the pages of a book. Blondes, brunettes, redheads; coy smiles and warm curves under his fingers—real fingers, not cybernetic ones. Dinners and dancing and goodnight kisses, or more than kisses, if he was lucky.
This little gem of information about himself was like a puzzle piece out on its own. He didn't have the pieces that connected to it, but at least he knew where this one went, and with any luck the adjoining pieces would be found in time.
"Now," Jemma said, a twinkle in her eye as she approached him with the first needle, "lie back and think of England."