{ 9. Top-Secret Assassin Chow }
"Don't be afraid to show your friends,
That you hurt inside,
Pain's a part of life,
Don't get behind your false pride,
It's a lie,
Your lie,
Don't slip away and don't forget,
I'll give you more than you can get"
-'Knock Me Down', Red Hot Chili Peppers
xXxXxXx
Steve didn't remember falling asleep. He woke with damp, sticky eyes and an arm wrapped around Bucky. He could feel the brunet's chest rise and fall under him as he slept. Still breathing, still holding on. Disentangling himself, Steve sat up and dragged a palm over his face. Orange light was beaming through the slits in the blinds. Traffic hummed faintly in the distance.
Something else hummed just then, followed by a beep. Steve turned to the side table. A green light was blinking on his phone—a text message. He furrowed his brow and cautiously picked up the device like it might bite him. Who the hell had this number besides Tony and Sam? They were never awake this early anyway.
Steve tapped the new message from an unregistered number.
"mashed banana, mix with water + 1/4 cup whey protein powder per banana. 3x daily dose of multivitamin."
Just as Steve finished reading the text, the phone vibrated in his hand and another popped up from the same number.
"ruined my manicure getting that. you owe me"
Natasha! That beautiful, wonderful, terrifying woman—She came through! Steve felt his limbs turn to spaghetti and he collapsed back onto the bed, planting a big smooch on the phone screen before letting it fall to the floor. His other hand covered his face and he wasn't sure if he should start sobbing or laugh maniacally at the sky.
Bananas. Fucking bananas. There were bananas at every gas station and store they hit, staring them right in the face the entire time Bucky was being crippled from hunger. Bucky had even showed them to Steve at one point and Steve ignored him because apparently Steve's head was full of rocks.
That's how he felt anyway, as he lay there exasperated at how absurd this was. Bananas.
"Bucky!" The blond man shook his friend's shoulder and Bucky rolled over to face him, squinting in the light. Steve was smiling down at him, all white teeth and crinkled eyes and golden bed-head. A real smile, like Sam's. "We got it figured out. You're gonna be okay, don't worry!"
Bucky looked back at him, groggy and doubtful. Steve landed a heavy pat on his shoulder and smashed his lips against Bucky's head, leaving a big kiss before scrambling off the bed and bounding through the door.
xXxXxXx
Sam made a quick trip to the corner store down the block. They already had the protein powder, so at least they'd been doing that right. This whole time, all Bucky's suffering could have been prevented with bananas and vitamins. Who knew? Not them, obviously, but now they held S.H.I.E.L.D's top-secret nourishment plan for their master assassin and Bucky would never have to come crawling back to a sinister handler again.
Even Bucky hadn't known exactly what that goop being forced down his throat was. The bananas in the gas station smelled familiar though, so he presented them to Steve but Steve rejected them because he was a smart handler and Bucky was a dumb weapon. Or maybe it was the opposite. It wasn't Bucky's place to think those things, or to think at all.
Steve chopped up six bananas on a paper plate and then mashed the pieces with a spoon. He scraped the paste into a bowl with some water and protein powder, stirring it all together into a thick mush before serving it to Bucky at the table. He shook three big vitamins from a bottle into his hand and laid them out beside the bowl with a glass of water. If Bucky could keep it down, that was roughly 700 calories for breakfast. Acceptable numbers for a super-soldier.
"There you go, Pal," he smiled, jabbing a plastic spoon into the bowl. Bucky wasted no time seizing that spoon and shoveling the mixture down. This stuff used to go through tubes down into his throat and he never actually got to taste it before. It was…Totally disgusting, he decided, but he was so hungry that the taste didn't matter.
When his bowl was empty, Bucky swallowed the vitamins one at a time because Christ, were they huge. The mash was gone, the vitamins were gone, the water was gone and he still felt like he could eat, but Sam said that was all the bananas they had left at the corner store and they'd have to hit an actual grocery store to get more.
"It actually makes sense if you think about it," Sam said to Steve. "You eat bananas when you can't keep anything else down. They have tons of vitamins, they're cheap, they're portable, no cooking required. If S.H.I.E.L.D wanted to make him dependent on any one food, bananas weren't a bad choice."
"Yeah, but…" Steve made a face of mild disgust. "I feel sorry for him. Bananas today don't taste like the ones we had growing up. They're gross now! I haven't been able to find a good one since they unfroze me."
Sam let out a hearty laugh, "Hate to break it to you, Man, but the ones you're used to went extinct. You 'n Bucky just have to deal with our nasty future-bananas."
Steve quirked an eyebrow. "Extinct? What—did they hunt them to extinction?"
Sam laughed again, "Sure, we'll go with that."
xXxXxXx
"Buckle up, Boys," said Tony, "and get ready for an exhilarating, balls-to-the-wall journey through Kansas." Steve slid beside him into the passenger seat and grinned,
"Maybe we'll get lucky and see Dorothy."
"If we're really lucky, maybe we'll see some corn," added Sam. He reclined in back next to Bucky, a cardboard packing-crate of bananas sitting between them.
Sam plucked a banana out and began to peel it as the van left the parking lot. Steve felt a sense of loss as he watched the hotel disappear behind them. It had been so comfortable. Still, it was best not to get too comfortable when they had dogs on their trail. Harder to hit a moving target and all that.
Sam refused to connect to the internet on his phone like Tony. It just felt like tempting fate, so he entertained himself with more primitive mediums. He finished his banana and pulling a marker from his bag, he drew two eyes and a little moustache on the peel. He held it upside-down from the bottom, wiggling it as he sang, "Nannerpuss, nannerpuss…"
A snort exploded from Bucky's nose and he slapped his hand over his mouth, feeling teeth against his palm as he smiled real big—bigger than he ever had before, he was pretty sure. Sam was smiling too, setting the peel on the floor and wiggling one of its "tentacles" to wave at Bucky.
Steve looked utterly confused as he turned around in his seat and queried, "Nannerpuss?"
"You never saw that commercial?" asked Sam. Tony mentioned,
"I think he was still a Capsicle for that Superbowl."
"Oh man, it was great," explained Sam. He pointed to Bucky and chuckled. "Look, Bucky knows. He appreciates my Nannerpuss."
Bucky's body was doing something like a bunch of hiccups and he couldn't stop. He was laughing, he realized, which wasn't allowed before. But he wasn't being punished, so the rules must be different here. "Alright, say goodbye to Nannerpuss," said Sam, then he rolled down the window and tossed the peel onto the side of the country road.
Tony mock-gasped, "Samuel Wilson! Are you littering? In front of Jesus and Captain America?" Sam rolled his eyes.
"It's food, Richard. Birds eat those things."
"Don't call me Richard in my own van, Wayne."
"Whatever you say, Dick."
Tony paused. "You know, Richard's fine," he decided.
The miles went by much faster than the hours, it felt like. What a boring drive. Everything was flat and corn and sky, Bucky observed. He was the only one bothering to observe the sights as Steve occupied himself with his jewel-game and Sam filled in a new crossword.
Bucky kneeled before the side window, watching the cornfields pass by. He pressed his nose to the glass and squinted when he saw someone crucified in the middle of a field—but no, it wasn't a person. It was a fake person, a scarecrow. He thought about the scarecrow coming to life, hair the color of straw with no brain at all. Kind of like Steve.
Bucky had been having so many strange thoughts like that lately, more and more every day. He didn't used to think so much, or at all. He remembered when he didn't have opinions, when he accepted everything that happened to him because his handlers said he was a machine, a tool, a weapon, and those things did not think or feel.
Steve and Sam and Tony—they wanted him to have opinions. They asked "Are you okay?" and "What color do you want?" and Bucky had to make decisions to please them. It was all very overwhelming sometimes. They wanted him to be a person and he was pretty sure that he wasn't one, but if that was his objective then he had to try to be.
Something beeped from Tony's pocket. He began fishing his phone out and Steve scolded, "Are you really gonna text and drive?" Tony rolled his eyes and tossed the phone in Steve's lap.
"God, you're a goody two-shoes," he said. "Read it to me then."
Steve tapped the message and paused, furrowing his brow at the long line of gibberish on the screen.
"Uh, it doesn't say anything. It's just numbers and letters," he reported. A brief silence passed between them. Then Tony muttered,
"Uh-oh."
Sam craned his neck toward the front and queried, "What's 'uh-oh'?"
"Uuuugh," Tony groaned, turning the wheel. The van drifted to the shoulder and came to a stop. "Wilson, pass the laptop, please." Sam did so without question, unzipping the leather bag and carefully pulling out the flat, red device. The others waited in silence as he flipped it open and tapped on the keys.
Tony sighed after a moment, thumping his head back against his seat.
"What? What's going on?" blurted Steve. Tony held up his palm and shook his head as he explained,
"Okay, so that tracking signal? It's being tampered with." He glanced back at the screen. "Doesn't look like they unscrambled it yet—it's just kind of jumping all over the place—but!"
Tony held up a finger, eyebrows sagging slightly. "We're standing at another bridge here. They will succeed eventually, and we need to start thinking about our next move when they do." Steve's gut was twisting. He shot a glance back at Bucky, staring between them all and looking equally as nervous.
Steve began, "So when they unscramble it, it'll lead them straight to Bucky? How long do we have?"
"Hell, I don't know." Tony shrugged. "Couple days? Couple minutes? S.H.I.E.L.D's hackers are like a box of chocolates—sometimes you get a chocolate, and sometimes you get a piece of shit."
"I don't think that's how the saying goes…" mumbled Sam.
"And the signal's coming from that chip in his arm," Steve clarified. "Is there any way to disable it?"
Tony replied flatly, "Not remotely. Only way to stop that signal is to destroy the chip completely, and S.H.I.E.L.D makes some burly-ass chips. Like, I'm talking water-proof, fire-proof, impact-proof…We're better off just digging it out of Barnes' arm and leaving it behind."
Steve's eyes darkened under his brow. He didn't like the sound of that one bit. "Is it possible to remove it without hurting him?" he asked. He felt like he already knew the answer. Tony's mouth stretched a little and he answered slowly, choosing his words carefully.
"Wellll…None of us are medical professionals, and we can't exactly take him to the hospital for something like this. You know better than anyone that painkillers, anesthetic—shit like that—doesn't work on him. So, uh…I'm gonna say no, it's gonna be a hack-job and it's gonna hurt like a bitch."
Steve's eyes rounded. Tony saw his expression and quickly added, "It won't kill him though! I can promise that much. We just—well, I can almost guarantee it's more than skin-deep. They probably attached it to the muscle. But if I recall correctly, that chip model is pretty small and removing it shouldn't be too traumatic to his anatomy. I think. Pretty sure!"
Another silence fell over the van, long and agonizing. Tony drummed his fingers against the side of his laptop, chewing his lip. Finally a big sigh came from Steve and he shook his head disapprovingly. "There has to be another way. He already had his spine cut open and spent the last several days starving to death! He can't take any more trauma."
Tony's head slumped against the back of his seat. "What do you want me to do, Rogers?" he snapped. "We can leave the chip alone and wait for S.H.I.E.L.D to come fuck with us, or we can remove it and fuck with them. Those are our options, so make a call."
Bucky's gaze shifted from Steve to Tony, then fixated on his arm. His smiling star-tattoo was faded and chipping away, despite how careful he was in the bath to save it. Steve set his jaw tight and stared at the barren road ahead, breath steadily gusting from his nostrils.
Of course he'd be the one to rip Bucky open again—not that he trusted anyone else to do it, but it wasn't something he was chomping at the bit to do. "It's going to hurt him…" Steve said, and his voice sounded smaller and more pathetic than he cared for. Tony shrugged in an exhausted kind of way.
"It'll be a little pinch compared to what S.H.I.E.L.D did to him."
"That's his only arm…"
"So it's better than removing it entirely like they did, right?"
"He won't understand…"
"Would you rather see him dragged back to the facility? Because he really won't understand that," Tony said with finality. Steve turned to the window and rolled his eyes. The only thing he hated more than Tony being wrong was Tony being right.
Tony watched the blond man drag a hand over his face and groan, decided to show a little mercy and suggested, "Look. We don't have to do it right this second. But whenever they crack that signal, it's go-time. Fair?" Steve hesitated, then nodded.
"Fine."
xXxXxXx