"You're sure he is alive?"
"Ja. He's alive. Shake him. He'll scream."
Bucky jolts and hisses through his teeth as one of them jabs him in the ribs to demonstrate. He feels tears stinging at his eyes, but blinks them away. He absolutely will not fucking cry in front of these bastards.
"He'll do." The fat man in round glasses says noncommittally. "Strap him down and we'll begin."
Bucky blacks out again when they cinch leather straps tight over his damaged chest and arm.
Everything runs together. He's lying on his back and everything hurts more than he ever imagined possible. He wavers in and out of consciousness. The fat man's face fades in and out. Sometimes it's there, above him, other times he just hears a sinisterly forgettable voice off to one side, out of his sight.
Someone takes a needle to his arm, none too gently. His bloodstream is on fire. He screams until his throat aches. He passes out.
The ribs have stopped hurting. He can breathe. The fat man is there, above him.
"Excellent. The compound is working exactly as I had hoped. It will need further testing." The fat man nods to a person out of sight. Someone steps forward and takes Bucky's ankle in both hands.
His hazy mind catches up to what is about to happen a second too late.
"Hey, no, wait, what the fuck are you-"
Bone snaps like brittle twigs. He screams until he can't breathe anymore.
"Set it." The fat man says.
Bucky doesn't remember what happens next.
He wakes up to electricity. He's lost time. He's got at least a few days worth more stubble than he started with. Arcs of raw energy spark over his fingertips and his back is bent like a bow as his muscles spasm. His skin is burning, sizzling, and he's too stunned even to scream. His entire body seizes as the voltage increases. He passes out again.
He remembers, blurrily, waking up once with his midsection cut open, the fat man doing something with a scalpel and a vial of a chemical that he can't identify. Mercifully, he's only conscious for a few seconds before darkness takes him again.
When he awakes to an empty room an indeterminate amount of time later, he prays fervently that it was a dream.
Later, when he examines himself after his rescue, there is a faint pink line, barely the width of a hair, down the middle of his belly. It vanishes a few days later. He can't stop shuddering for an hour.
Bucky wakes up in the darkness to the sound of his mother's voice. She's calling him. He struggles to raise his head, still strapped to the hard wood of the table - disoriented and confused.
"Ma…?"
"James, where are you? It's dark…"
"Ma, get outta here!"
How did they find his mother? And what are they going to do to her…?
"James? James where are you?" The voice is moving farther away.
"Ma, please!" His voice shakes. His body shakes. He's panicking, but he can't help himself.
The voice fades away. He spends the next hour sobbing quietly in the empty lab.
The next time he hears someone, it's Steve.
… Steve getting the shit beaten out of him by three or four guys, from the sound of it.
"I can do this all day!" The kid announces, already sounding like he's taken a hit to the gut. There's the sharp crack of a fist connecting with bone, and he hears Steve hit the wall, hard.
"Leave him alone!" Bucky screams, struggling against the straps that hold him down.
"Bucky?"
"Kid, run!" Bucky calls, but the fat man is the one who answers him.
"Interesting." Is all he says. Another needle in his arm.
Bucky blacks out.
He starts to see things. Thing that can't be real.
Becca is just a baby, toddling across the table - playing with her blocks in mid-air beside his head. He stares at the vision, wide-eyed, feeling his sanity starting to fray.
It's not real, he reminds himself. Becca's almost 13. It ain't real… Don't let them fuck with your head. Don't let 'em in.
He sees his friends from highschool walk across the room, shooting the shit about baseball. They walk straight through the wall and vanish, still talking. He hears them on the other side of the wall until they are too far away to make out any longer.
He sees Steve. Sometimes just sitting there across the room, drawing something; bony knees drawn up to his chest. Sometimes getting the stuffing knocked out of him. Sometimes just staring sadly at him.
Steve asks him once, why he's not coming home. Bucky can't find his voice to answer. He's shaking all over when Steve finally fades into the floor and disappears.
He thinks his arm is missing once, and panics. He thrashes and wriggles, trying to look, to confirm his fears, only to finally struggle up enough to see it lying there, still attached, fingers clenched into a fist. He starts to feel like he's floating. Empty. Boneless. The world slips away from him.
Everything is emptiness and pain. He has no idea where he is. He vaguely remembers repeating his name, rank, and serial number ad infinitum. He doesn't know how long he lays there just doing that, over and over, while god-only-knows-what goes on around him.
He remembers Steve's face looking down at him and thinking that this is it. He's finally dying, and this is his last hallucination.
"Bucky… Oh my god…"
The hallucination is in army fatigues… that's new.
And it's tearing off the straps on the table, shaking him like it wants him to wake up. He stops mumbling and stares up at the ceiling in a daze. The hallucinations never did this before.
"Who… who's'ere?" He mutters distantly.
"Steve. It's Steve." The hallucination looks relieved and horrified and… real. So real.
"Steve?" He can't help himself. Even if this is just another horrible dream in the making, he's too starved for this. For his friend. For any kind of comfort in this godforsaken hell-hole. "Steve…" He smiles, in spite of himself, letting Steve sit him up and noticing that this Steve is tall. He's more than that… he's huge.
… He's everything Steve always wanted to be. Always was inside.
Bucky leaves that part out of his retelling. It's not relevant, and fuck the US Army for putting him here in the first place. They took enough out of him already. They don't get to have this too.
He trails off.
"Steve told you the rest, I think." He finishes lamely. He's embarrassed to realize that he's trembling noticeably, head to foot. He can't muster the energy to try to hide it right now. He feels drained. Exhausted.
"How many times were you injected, son?" The colonel's voice is soft, but his tone make it clear this is still an investigation, not a polite inquiry. He expects to be answered.
"Fuck, I don't know, sir." Bucky scrubs a hand over his face. "I was in and out. At least six for sure. Might be more."
"Was it the same substance every time?"
"Doubt it, sir. Sometimes I would pass out. Sometimes I'd hear things. See things…" He shudders, remembering some of the more awful things his brain tormented him with on that table. "Never the same shit twice."
The colonel doesn't appear to notice that he's not being addressed particularly politely. He nods.
"Probably different formulas, different chemicals. See what happened on a human guinea-pig..." he mutters. Then he stands up, setting a hand slowly and gently on Bucky's shoulder, telegraphing the motion as he does. Bucky flinches, but doesn't pull away.
"Get some rest, Barnes. I've got some people to meet with. We'll talk tomorrow." Bucky nods, wearily, raising his eyes. The colonel almost smiles at him.
"Wear pants."
"Yessir…" The words slur a little. Bucky lets out a heavy, silent sigh of relief as the colonel vanishes behind the curtain and he's left alone in his little bubble of isolation again.
He feels absolutely no shame in breaking down and crying himself out in his cot, as the nurses quietly skirt around his alcove, pointedly going on their rounds without disturbing him.
He doesn't think he's ever felt more alone in his life.
A/N: I hope you still have that puppy around for hugging...