88.
?
?
Hours pass.
Bucky sits and waits, staring at the door, waiting for his sister to return. He has no idea where she's been taken or what's happening. He can only pray that they're saving her.
He tries the cell door, tries desperately to escape. He jiggles the lock and bends the metal bars, trying to force it open. Just as he nearly thinks he's got it, the bars spark with electricity and the shock runs through his body. His hands involuntarily grab hold of the electrified door and he clenches his teeth against the shock, shaking. Finally, it stops, and he slumps to the ground, and he can hear the electricity in his brain and his ears, sparking and snapping. His hand, the only one made of skin, is burnt and red and burning. His metal hand shows no sign of the carnage.
Bucky then has no choice but to sit, in his blood-soaked corner, and stare at the bloody mess of Isabel's cell. So much blood. He isn't sure how there could be that much blood in a person's body. How was there anything left in Isabel?
He sits and stares for hours, and thinks.
Thinks of everything.
But mainly, a way out.
A few hours later, Madame Hydra returns empty handed.
She opens the door to Bucky's cell, raising an eyebrow at how he's managed to damage it, and then points a gun at him.
"Come on, up. It's your turn," she instructs.
Bucky frowns but stands and lets her lead him out of the cells into the bright hallways. They walk a little way down the grey concreted hall before he speaks.
"Where's my sister?"
"She's… being healed."
Bucky doesn't like the way she says it, the way she paused. "Where the hell is she?" Bucky growls.
He pounces sideways, slamming Madame Hydra into the metal wall of the corridor with his metal hand wrapped around her slender neck. Immediately, a hundred agents appear from seemingly nowhere and another hundred guns are aimed at him from all angles as the surrounding agents protect their leader, the only leader Hydra's got left.
Madame Hydra laughs, right in Bucky's face, an evil cackle that makes Bucky's blood boil. A bit of spit lands on his cheek. "You really think you are more powerful than me," she sneers, and it isn't a question, but a statement.
In a second, she grabs Bucky's hand that clutches her neck and flips him around, slamming him into the opposite wall. She grabs his human arm and holds it painfully up against his back at an unnatural angle, pressing his hand against his spine.
"Try that again and I break it," she warns, voice menacing.
"Get fucke– AHH!"
Madame Hydra jolts Bucky's arm and he feels the shoulder joint snap out of place, cutting himself off with a strangled cry of pain. His only human shoulder is now ruined to pair along with the other one missing at the joint, replaced by a grafted-on metal prosthetic that hurts like hell every second of the day. Bucky grits his teeth against the pain of his now-dislocated shoulder, eyes welling with tears. He won't show them weakness. He won't–
"Are you going to behave, Sergeant? Or shall I rip your other arm off? Better yet, shall we allow your sister to die? I could stop the surgery right now."
Bucky swallows. "Depends what you want with me."
"Not much," Madame Hydra promises. "For now. So, what will it be?"
Bucky swallows any dignity he may have left. "I'll behave," he grits.
Madame Hydra lets go of his head and he pulls away from the wall. His jaw cracks painfully as he swallows again.
They start walking again and an army of agents follow, their rifles still raised to Bucky's head. Bucky holds his arm against his chest, clutching his shoulder. Every step makes it ache, burn, with the pain. He wipes away the tears in his eyes, not all of them from the pain.
Bucky allows himself to be led through the corridors until they get to a large room that they stop in the middle of. It's got high ceilings and thick walls, the doors made of impenetrable metal. An abundance of medical machinery sits around the room. Another version of the memory-wiping chair sits in the middle of the room. And then, along the back wall stand four familiar tube-like structures, just large enough for a human to stand inside. Bucky recognises them immediately from Castle Hydra and from the last fifteen months of his captivity where he's visited them frequently – they're cryogenic pods to preserve people. Bucky swallows the lump in his throat.
"Your sister is over there," Madame Hydra says, pointing to a hospital bed in the other corner that's set up like an infirmary.
Isabel lies there, almost lifeless, hooked up to a whole lot of machinery, including a heartrate monitor that beats away lazily. It's too familiar, having seen her in a hospital like this only one other time, and that had been caused by Madame Hydra as well. She's still bloodied and bruised. Bucky immediately notices an IV inserted into her inner elbow.
"What are you giving her?" Bucky asks quietly, praying its pain medication and not what he thinks it is.
"Her injuries are extensive enough that we cannot heal her with traditional medicine alone, and those injuries are not only from the beating. All those days without food and water; it's a surprise she's even alive to begin with. We had her for a week before you were reunited. Without alternative intervention, she'll die."
"What kind of alternative intervention?" Bucky growls, but he needn't ask. He recognises the grey liquid in the IV connected to the crook of her elbow.
"You are both brother and sister," Madame Hydra explains. "Which means you share the same genetics. The only thing that can save her is an infusion of the super soldier serum. You survived it, so there's a good chance she will."
Bucky blows out a breath somewhere between a sigh and a sob. Steve and he had spent so long keeping her out of all of this mess, saving her from being infused with the serum twice, and yet, they've failed. Bucky's failed as her brother and her protector. As soon as Steve's gone, Bucky is helpless to save her.
He hangs his head in shame. "I never wanted this."
"If you'd both cooperated from the beginning, we never would have had to reach such extents," Madame Hydra tells him easily. "She'll survive it. The infusion is nearly complete, and she is healing rapidly. She is breathing on her own, now, and her heartrate has steadied. Within a few more hours it will be successful. You've no need to worry."
"No need to worry?" Bucky parrots. "Are you fuckin' serious?"
"I am very serious, Sergeant. So long as you both behave and cooperate with our needs, you will be treated humanely, and you will be safe."
"How is taking away our autonomy humane? How is torturing us to get what you want humane? How is turning us into super-soldiers against our will humane? How is any of this right?" Bucky explodes.
"You will see, one day, that this is the correct course for the world, Sergeant. This is the path to success and to a free world; a world free from flags and nations, united as one. We're going to change the world. We're going to shape it into somewhere worthy of humankind's existence. Do you understand?"
"You're deranged," Bucky notes, shaking his head in disbelief. "This is insane."
"Maybe, Sergeant. Or perhaps the world you always knew is the insanity that you've been conditioned to follow, and this is the intended reality. I suppose it depends on your… what is the word? Perspective."
Bucky doesn't know how to respond to that, how to digest the madness. It makes his head hurt. "And if we don't cooperate?" Bucky asks quietly instead.
"A bullet to the head should suffice," Madame Hydra says with a shrug. "Or we could make it painful for her. Depends how much trouble you are to us."
Bucky looks at his sisters' lifeless body. Escaping could still be possible, especially if Isabel takes to her enhancements as well. Two super-soldiers could surely escape from… wherever they are. But he will have to wait until she's recovered and healed. Carrying her and escaping would be impossible. They'll only get one chance to escape – they need to make it count.
Bucky will have to play along, for now, until they're both ready. He just hopes he can hold out long enough for when that time comes.
Bucky takes a deep, shuddering breath. "I'll do whatever you want. I'll do and be whatever you want me to be, but only if you give me your word she won't be harmed. Ever, again," Bucky says sternly, staring right into Madame's piercing green eyes.
Madame Hydra stares at Bucky for a long while, so close they're almost nose to nose. "You have my promise," she finally says. "If you behave, we won't touch her. We aren't finished with her anyway."
Madame Hydra leads Bucky to the mind-wiping chair, and he goes without resistance. She sits him down and straps his arms and legs tightly. Bucky just stares at his sister, unconscious on the hospital bed, watching as her heartrate steadily climbs toward a healthier range and her breathing grows deeper, less shallow and desperate.
He closes his eyes as the pads come down to rest on his temples. He imagines Isabel as he remembered her before – smiling and happy, standing beside a beaming Steve as he was before the serum, small and sickly but happy. He imagines his parents and Becca and Robbie. He sees the Commandos drinking in the bar, and Peggy walking in to greet him, a smirk on her red-painted lips that are then planted gently against his cheek.
Those memories, of what he remembers and what he's now lost, keep him calm as the machine starts up. He jolts when the electricity flows through his brain, catches him alight once again with fire and pain.
Isabel takes a long time to recover. Longer than anyone expected. And when she does awaken, she's whisked away before Bucky can protest. Out of sight, away from the light, Bucky loses sight of what he was fighting for.
Slowly, wipe after wipe, those memories he's been clinging to in his final moments as James Buchanan Barnes start to slip away from him, little by little, word by word, smile by smile, until he's left but nothing but black abysses where memories used to be.