A dozen armed men and the iron-suited soldier someone called Rhodes surrounded him when they arrived in Berlin. They were transferring him. When he saw the cage with the metal chair in the center, his mouth went dry and fear wrapped around his chest like a snake, crushing the air from his lungs.
"Get in," Rhodes ordered.
When his legs refused to move, he was shoved from behind, guns circling his head. The weapons of the iron suit hummed to life. He caught a glimpse of Steve through the glass of the next armored car, and even as Bucky calculated his odds of escape, Steve's eyes held him in place.
The guards shoved him into the chair, yanking up his left sleeve. The restraints coiled around his arms and legs. The chair hummed for a moment, and panic sent his lungs into overdrive as a metal piece came toward his head…then clamped over his chest and shoulders.
The jolt of electricity stole his breath, and for a moment, reality shifted — he was in another place, in a bunker, surrounded by men, his skull in a metal vice, having his memories scorched from his brain. The current vanished, and he came back to the present.
It was his arm. He looked down at the clamps around his metal forearm. They'd electrified them to disable the limb. He barely had time to catch his breath when it hit again.
His body remembered the torment, etched in its very fibers, haunting him just as fiercely as his fractured mind. The last time he'd been in a device like this, they'd burned the memory of Steve from his brain.
The chair holding him was no last-minute construction. It was too perfect, tailored for him. They had it ready for him before he was even captured.
The shocks were painful but bearable, far less than the torture Hydra had inflicted.
When they arrived at the facility, a forklift moved his cage. Steve was there, all rigid lines of determination, and when he looked over his shoulder, Bucky locked gazes with him for a moment.
He saw the reflection of what he was in Steve's face—a caged beast—and looked away.
Eyes forward. No expression. He knew how to do this. He'd done it for seventy years.
Another pulse went through his metal arm, and he gritted his teeth as it made its way through his body, down his spine, into his brain. His ears rang with each jolt. They were timed at five-second intervals, a maddening rhythm designed to keep his arm captive.
They ushered him into the darkness of an elevator, armed guards flanking him, descending deep into the bowels of the facility. Finally, they reached a chamber of concrete and muted lighting, reminiscent of Siberia but upgraded with sophisticated technology and artificial warmth. No one spoke to him. He wasn't human to them. He was a dangerous animal.
They were smart.
For a moment, the power went out, and he got a few moments of relief, but when they connected the line, the internal lights came on, and the current sliced into him. He gritted his teeth and looked up, squinting against the harsh lights.
The armed guards waited, a few giving furtive glances his way.
He held his breath when another pulse hit. He hoped he'd never be in another chair like this, but at least this one wasn't stealing his memories. He'd worked too hard to get them back.
But he sometimes wished he could forget again.
He sat there for an hour, guarded by strangers who glanced at him with apprehension and morbid curiosity. Time dripped away like a cruel melody, and he counted the agonizing seconds between each shock. Five seconds of current. Five seconds of relief.
…Two. Three. Four….
He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes when another jolt hit. Five seconds later, he released the air in his lungs and opened his eyes. One of the guards looked away a little too quickly.
Moments later, the guards left, and his stomach sank. That was never a good sign. Whatever they were going to do with him, they didn't want witnesses.
Where was Steve?
A man entered, donning a suit and glasses, his demeanor superficially gentle, yet beneath the façade, a morbid curiosity gleamed in his eyes that Bucky had seen a hundred times before. Bucky was a thing on display—the monster that everyone was curious about even as they kept their distance.
"Hello, Mr. Barnes," the man said. "I've been sent by the United Nations to evaluate you. Do you mind if I sit?"
The question was a mockery of choice. Bucky had no agency here, no control. They both knew that.
The man sat at a table facing the cage. Bucky kept his gaze locked on a metal beam above, a fixed point in his ever-spinning world.
"Your first name is James?"
James Buchanan Barnes. It had been decades since he'd heard his name from anyone other than Steve.
Before that….
'Sergeant Barnes?' Howard Stark's voice whispered from the depths of his mind.
The jolt took him by surprise this time, and when it was over, he slouched forward, head low.
"I'm not here to judge you," the man continued.
The judgments had already been cast, splashed on headlines and burned into the fabric of his existence, except, perhaps, by Steve, who might—just maybe—still believe there was enough of him left to save.
That hurt more than the chair.
"I just want to ask you a few questions. Do you know where you are James?"
He was in a cage, in a cement bunker. Again. He'd known it was only a matter of time before someone found him.
"I can't help you if you don't talk to me, James."
Help. There was only one person interested in helping him. Steve. He'd helped him back in Bucharest, and even though his face made it clear he wasn't sure who he was dealing with – Bucky, the Winter Soldier, or something in between—Steve still helped him. And for those fleeting moments, fighting side by side, the echoes of their shared past had whispered, and it almost felt like home.
Was Steve watching now? He was the only person worth talking to…the only one who might believe him.
He looked up, talking not to the man in front of him, but to the one not present—the one he hoped was watching. "My name is Bucky."
He gritted his teeth and rode out another five seconds of electricity.
"Tell me, Bucky. You've seen a great deal, haven't you?"
"I don't want to talk about it." He dreamed about it every night. Every time he closed his eyes, there was a fresh nightmare.
"You feel that, if you open your mouth, the horrors might never stop?"
The horrors were there whether or not he opened his mouth.
…Three…Four
He closed his eyes and rode out another five seconds.
"Don't worry," the man continued, and there was something new in his tone that sent a chill down Bucky's spine, "we only have to talk about one."
One?
When the power went out, so did the charged restraint disabling his arm, and he breathed with the reprieve, but only for a moment. There was something in the man's expression…
Dread burned like acid in his gut. They'd found him. Someone had found him. Whatever trap had been set was about to be sprung.
Locked in a gaze with the man, Bucky scrutinized his face, frantically sifting through the fragments of his memory. Was he Hydra? Bucky couldn't remember seeing him before. Most of his memories had returned, but there were still holes.
Bucky tensed against the restraints. "What the hell is this?" Without the disabling current, he might be able to break free.
Where was Steve?
"Why don't we discuss your home? Not Romania. Certainly not Brooklyn, no. I mean, your real home."
When the man pulled out the red book with the black star on the cover, Bucky went cold. The secrets buried within those pages held the power to unravel his precarious existence, to plunge him further into the abyss, to strip away all that he'd regained and unleash the monster within.
No.
AUTHOR'S NOTES
I stumbled across artwork and information from the Captain America Artwork book that stated the clamps holding Bucky's arm periodically deliver a strong electric current to keep him from using the arm.
Why the heck they didn't make that known during the movie is beyond me - it would have added an additional dark, painful layer to those scenes. When they land Bucky in sublevel five, they plug the cage into a thick power cord. When the power goes out, he's able to escape.
I know I've been throwing stories out a lot - in fact, I passed a million words a couple of postings ago with Operation Hindsight. I can't believe I've written that much about Bucky Barnes. Wow.
As always, I LOVE hearing your comments. I have a thick skin. I don't bite. If you're inclined to drop me a line (or even point out a typo), you'll bring a huge smile to my day!
FYI, I might make this into a series of Civil War missing scenes, but for now, it's a one-shot.