Archive of Our Own

Sam was so relieved to get out of the prison building that he didn’t realize until later that he had no idea how Bucky planned to get him the files. He needn’t have worried; the next day a slip of paper appeared in his pocket while he visited a coffee shop after his morning run — an exercise that felt a bit lonely without Steve playfully lapping him every few minutes. Sam palmed the paper when he discovered it, looking around while he carried his large hot coffee over to an empty stool, but he didn’t spot anyone who seemed to be paying the least bit of attention to him. D.C. seemed to pride itself on pretending not to notice the Avengers roaming the streets when they were in town, which suited Sam just fine right now. He unfolded the paper to read a set of coordinates and what looked like a lock combination. He shoved it back in his pocket wondering how the hell Bucky managed to get him info from inside his cell. Who had he bribed, and with what? Probably better not to know.

The coordinates led Sam to a storage locker in the Smithsonian coat check. Of course. Sam thought about crying bald eagles and apple pies and the predictability of super-soldiers from the 1940s. Inside the locker sat one of those crazy-high capacity thumb drives that all spies seemed to have laying about. Sam glanced around and smoothly pocketed the device before strolling through the museum, subtly looking for any trace of a tail. He started out avoiding the Captain America exhibit, then thought that might look suspicious if he were being followed, and finally ended up standing with his hands shoved deep in his pockets, the drive in his fist, staring at a giant mural of Steve busting Nazi ass.

“Man, I wish you were here,” he muttered. “Wish you were handling this shit instead of me.” The Steve Rogers who thrust a big middle finger in the faces of 117 countries would probably have Barnes’ defense strategically planned out, with the caveat that if it all went sideways he’d just grab Barnes off the witness stand, hoist him over his shoulder, and abscond with him somewhere out where talking raccoons and walking trees were commonplace. But that Steve Rogers left to live in the past, and Sam wasn’t sure he wanted to risk his recently-recovered life and freedom for a sullen ex-assassin with serious psychological issues.

He wandered around until he faced the memorial to Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, inseparable from Captain America on and off the battlefield and all that crap. The man who pouted from the oversized photograph looked both impossibly young and unutterably weary. The beginnings of a thousand-yard stare had already taken up residence in those big, pretty eyes, and the movie idol looks were hardened and cracked around the edges by a grim wariness. Barnes had been a good man, Sam had no doubt of that, but he could see the seeds of the Winter Soldier in those hard eyes and clenched jaw. He knew about the torture that electrocuted Barnes’ brain and wiped out his memory and sense of self, but as horrible as that sounded, it didn’t seem quite enough to explain the transformation from righteous American soldier fighting for freedom to unfeeling murderbot. Like many people who had never been captured in war, Sam acknowledged that he probably wouldn’t be able to withstand torture while secretly sure that he would fare better than Barnes. He wondered exactly what HYDRA had done to refine the man into their remorseless pet killer, blindly following orders no matter how twisted or wrong.

He squeezed his fingers around the drive in his pocket and figured he was about to find out.

---

Later in his hotel room, Sam plugged the thumb drive into his laptop and reconsidered all his life choices. For all he knew this thing would infect his computer and through the internet manage to hijack the International Space Station and turn it into a giant deflector dish to burn a hole in the earth, or some other supervillain shit. Aliens would probably crawl out of the USB port and shoot magic lasers from their assholes or something. Wizards would take over the hard drive and spam pornbots to knock the world’s financial systems offline forever. The laptop could become sentient and decide to force everyone living to learn Common Core math.

“God damn it,” Sam muttered, and opened the drive.

Hundreds of files appeared, in no particular order that Sam could discern, with filenames that were just collections of letters and numbers without sense. Of course. He sorted by file type to try and impose some order on the mess and skimmed over things at random.

The cursor hovered over one of the pdfs and with a sense of foreboding, Sam clicked it open.

It showed an incomprehensible diagram of circuity overlaid onto what looked like a map of the human nervous system. The next image depicted a human skeleton, with measurements and notations in Russian. Sam did a quick computer translation and came up with the words titanium and adamantium.

“Oh shit,” he muttered, realizing he was looking at schematics of how they’d attached the prosthetic arm and made it responsive to Bucky’s will. He clicked through a few more images that showed exploded diagrams, drawings of individual nerves with axons wrapped around bare wires, mechanical dendrites climbing into brain nodules. He ran translation on a few paragraphs of notes and discovered speculative musings on the durability of cybernetic connections, ideas for how the electro-chemical impulses of nerves would translate to the wires, what levels of sodium and potassium needed to be present to facilitate transfer of polarity, what substances could best mimic myelination.

A hell of a lot of good science went into that metal arm. Fucking Nazis. Sam shook his head and clicked on a video.

Agonized screaming ripped through his computer speakers. He threw himself backward, slamming the laptop shut, and toppled the chair, doing an awkward spread-legged dance to keep his feet. After a few minutes while he stood motionless, waiting for cardiac arrest to hit or pass, Sam approached the closed laptop like a bomb rigged to explode at the slightest touch. Carefully, he lifted the lid, and with the video on pause lowered the volume. He righted his chair and sat gingerly, staring for a long horrified moment at the still image. The image had the camera positioned up high, giving a bird’s eye view of a brightly lit operating theater in use.

The man on the table was unquestionably Bucky Barnes, face swollen and bloodied and bruised but still those same huge eyes, those cheekbones a person could cut themselves on. In the paused image, those normally grey eyes were almost black, pupils dilated as far as possible in overwhelming panic. His cut and bleeding lips stretched open over a now silent scream, his jaw distended from the force of it and cords bursting out in his neck.

His chest and shoulder were flayed open, skin peeled back to reveal ropy red muscles tipped with white tendons, just like in Sam’s high school AP Anatomy and Physiology textbook. Except in his textbook, the image was bloodless and clean and not being suctioned and cauterized while the human being in question lay conscious and shrieking so loudly it blew out the computer speakers.

He shut the laptop again and stood up.

“Nope. Just…nope.” Sam walked away and in a wide circle around the hotel room, scrubbing his hands up his face and over the top of his head. “Fuck that, I do not need to see that.” Except he couldn’t unsee it now, could he? And Bucky… Bucky had said almost nothing about his time with HYDRA, suffering these memories in lonely silence. Didn’t Sam owe it to him — owe it to Steve — to bear some sort of witness to what the man had endured? Wasn’t the whole point of this to find evidence to exonerate him?

In truth, Sam knew nothing about James Barnes except what had been written in the history books — not much, beyond his role in the war and his friendship with Captain America — and the few stories Steve let slip while they hunted for him after Insight. Sam’s familiarity with Steve transferred a bit to this grumpy other best friend, but he had to remind himself that he didn’t really know this man at all. He assumed Bucky was a good person because Steve had loved him. He assumed Bucky could be redeemed because Steve had wanted to save him. He assumed Bucky was being stubborn because Steve had been a fucking mule. Maybe Sam needed to stop making assumptions. Maybe Bucky had a reason for not cooperating with his lawyers that went deeper than a masochistic urge to take responsibility for shit that wasn’t his fault. Maybe these files held secrets that would affect whether or not he should be pardoned.

“Ugh,” Sam groaned, staring at the innocuous laptop with its venomous burden. “Fine, fine, fine,” he muttered, punctuating each word with an action: sitting down, propping his elbows on the desk, opening the laptop. “Hell,” he said, and hit play.

Sixteen minutes later, he got up and went into the bathroom. He didn’t vomit, but it was a close thing. He turned on the sink faucet and stuck his head under it, drinking what splashed into his mouth, then closing his eyes and letting the cold water sluice over his face. Mistake. The images imprinted on the inside of his eyelids turned his stomach in a slow queasy loop. He turned off the water and dried his face and head, then stared into the mirror for a while. Instead of his reflection, he saw slippery curls of muscle folded around metal inlaid into and around bone.

The surgery itself was fascinating, cutting-edge science and a miracle of medical engineering, especially for the time period. If Bucky hadn’t been awake and screaming, trying to writhe away from the clamps that held him immobile until he passed out from pain and shock… Sam knew that brain surgery had to be done while the patient was conscious, but this seemed to be cruel and brutal just for the sake of seeing how much the man could bear. They hadn’t even touched his head; they were anchoring the arm in, drilling metal reinforcements around his scapula and spine and clavicle. Why would they need him awake for that except that they were fucking thugs, murderous batshit-crazy fucking Nazis who got off on torturing a prisoner of war?

Sam placed both hands on the edge of the counter and squeezed hard, hunching his shoulders. If he’d had a super-soldier’s strength, the laminate would have crumbled under his fingers, but he was only human, only Sam, and he only managed to hurt his own palms.

After a while, he swallowed four aspirin from the helpfully provided packets nestled among the soaps and mini shampoo bottles, and returned to the computer. He hovered the cursor over another file, bracing himself, then clicked on a document instead. He couldn’t stomach another moment of that horrifying screaming.

For a long moment, his brain refused to process the image: a scan of a human brain, but with all sorts of strange white filaments and lines. And holes. Sam knew a brain was supposed to have a couple of ventricle spaces, but he felt pretty sure he was looking at something else. Lesions. Scarring. And three bright white spikes driven deep into the frontal and prefrontal cortices.

Sam had taken Psych 101 in college and learned about Phineas Gage, the poor sonofabitch who got a tamping rod shot straight through his chin and out the top of his damn skull. That’s how scientists learned to stick icepicks in people’s eye sockets to zonk them out and shit. HYDRA…HYDRA had basically done that to Bucky’s brain. With — he checked the accompanying notes and ran them through Google translate, which guaranteed any NSA agents monitoring his searches some unpleasant dreams — with roofing nails. That they then just left in his skull, sticking into his brain.

Iron nails that were in his brain while he was being regularly electrocuted in the head. For fuck’s sake.

Shuri had to have taken them out, right? Hell, wouldn’t Bucky have done it himself, once he regained a sense of personhood after Insight? Oh, God, that brought on a full color mental image of Bucky, huddled on the stained mattress in that shithole apartment in Bucharest, greasy hair dripping blood as he pried fucking roofing nails out of his own fucking head.

“That’s enough,” Sam croaked to the empty room. “I’m done. I’m not getting paid nearly enough for this shit.”

His conscience sidled up to the bar and wondered if any of this actually exonerated Bucky. Sam had seen the great legal arm of the nation in action during the Insight inquests and watched footage of the hearings that resulted in the repeal of the Sokovia Accords. The US Government would do anything to avoid admitting culpability, no matter how small the issue; they would be perfectly willing to hang Bucky out to dry and claim he worked willingly with HYDRA rather than publicly expose the rotten core hidden all this time beneath their noses. And while the military had clear guidelines regarding POWs not being responsible for their actions under duress, Bucky had spoken the bitter truth: the enormity of the Winter Soldier’s crimes went beyond giving up state secrets or murdering civilians. He was on trial for, among other felonies, multiple counts of treason. News stations sold ad space like the Super Bowl whenever pundits on either side whipped themselves and their audiences into a frenzy over the danger the Winter Soldier posed to the nation and the unsuspecting public. It seemed radical right and radical left could agree on two things: they hated the President, and James Barnes should be blamed for every political upset and regime collapse of the past seventy years.

And it didn’t matter what kind of hero he’d been in ‘45 or who called him friend; if Barnes didn’t have absolutely rock-solid evidence to show he had no volition of his own during his captivity, that he hadn’t known or hadn’t the capacity to understand the significance of his targets and his missions, he’d be crucified. In court, in public opinion, and likely on the street at high noon.

Sam needed to find that evidence, something obvious enough that even the idiots raving online would accept it. Roofing nails in the brain made a good start, but not enough.

He clicked several files at random and scarred his psyche watching a short video of the Winter Soldier, long-haired and glassy-eyed, getting his brain fried like the catch of the goddamn day, pissing himself helplessly as his body spasmed. While two heavy metal clamps immobilized the metal arm, gleaming with defrosted ice or lubricant or sweat or who the fuck knew, the soldier’s other arm and the rest of his body remained unsecured. Sam couldn’t fathom why; it wasn’t like Bucky couldn’t find sixteen ways to kill a person without even using his prosthetic. And yet his captors expected him to obediently sit there and be zapped to hell and gone. Fucking bizarre, and not helpful to prove Bucky’s innocence. Sam sorted by timestamp and clicked on a more recent video, hoping for a locker room confessional where HYDRA scientists looked into the camera and laid out their crimes in full legally prosecutable detail.

He could tell right away that this video was different. The others were of varying qualities depending on the technology available when they were filmed, but were all clearly documentation meant to accompany the written files. This one, though, had the highest picture and sound quality, but was filmed on someone’s phone and seemed to be included by mistake. It showed a cluster of well-dressed people at some sort of fancy gathering, like a fundraising party among the hoity-toity elite that Stark might have thrown. Velvet-swagged walls and champagne flutes abounded, and somewhere an orchestra played classical music that Sam couldn’t identify because it wasn’t Vivaldi’s Primavera. He recognized quite a few faces, some behind bars now, others still in powerful political offices. Just having them on this video gave him damning evidence, and Sam leaned forward, excited. He guessed this must be footage either of Bucky body guarding some high-ranking HYDRA official, or showing off his prowess to an admiring crowd who would then finance a few more world domination schemes.

The press of well-dressed bodies parted for the cameraperson, revealing the Winter Soldier draped across a divan, and Sam flinched, realizing this wasn’t a demonstration of his skills at all. At least not his martial skills.

The man sat naked, his bare and hairless skin gleaming with some kind of oil that highlighted every powerful muscle in his lithe form. His steady, shallow breathing caused light to reflect off the thin silvery chain that stretched between ringed nipples and descended down his body to his lap where it connected to more piercings that glinted in his cock, semi-hard and encircled by a metal ring at the base. The soldier’s body lay positioned partly supine, leaning back on his natural arm with the prosthetic balanced on the angular jut of his hip bone. One long leg bent beneath the other, stretched gracefully along the length of the seat, his solid thighs tense despite the casual posture. His dark hair looked unusually clean and soft in contrast to his sallow skin and the dark smudges of illness or chronic lack of sleep under his unfocused eyes. The uneven ends hung loosely around his chin, which tilted up to accommodate the wide expanse of silver metal collaring his throat. The chain from the collar led to a hook in the nearby wall; a pretty faceted decoration that the soldier could probably snap by sneezing. His face was bare to better show off his remote beauty, but on another hook beside the leash hung a glittering steel version of his mask.

The soldier held himself perfectly still on the divan, although as the camera swooped in, Sam could see little twitches in the muscles of the arm and shoulder bearing his weight. An elegantly dressed woman entered the frame with two male companions, all three holding champagne flutes and laughing at some witticism. The woman casually sat on the soldier’s bent leg and leaned back, pressing his body into the shimmering velvet cushion beneath him while she fished a cigarette out of her purse and the men competed to light it for her. Her berry-dark lips curved in a languid smile as she shifted her weight, crossing and recrossing her legs as they spoke indistinctly, occasionally rocking back to laugh or forward to make a point. Each time she moved, the Winter Soldier’s cheek twitched and he fought to keep himself expressionless. When the woman stood and led her companions off, the soldier inhaled in visible relief.

Sam frowned, momentarily putting aside the weird-ass perversion of a naked Bucky chained to a sofa at a fancy party. The dude could bench press a truck, that tiny HYDRA bitch shouldn’t have made him bat an eyelash. Then the cameraperson zoomed in; the soldier’s leg shifted slightly and Sam saw beads of blood dotting his pasty skin. Scowling in concentration, Sam leaned forward as the camera moved closer, and his jaw sagged as the details finally coalesced into cohesion. The Winter Soldier wasn’t lounging on a velvet cushion.

He lay on fine shards of glass.

The camera panned up the soldier’s naked body — Sam blinked away from a screenful of bedazzled super-soldier wang — and over to where his flesh arm trembled under him. Blood trailed in thin streams as the razor-edged splinters shredded his skin. His turbo-charged body healed the damage swiftly only for him to be sliced open again with each tiny movement. The stress position alone had to be making the soldier’s shoulder and back muscles scream, let alone the needle-stabs of pain as the glass shards slowly flayed his skin away.

The camera moved back to reveal his full body again and Sam wondered how the fuck Bucky managed to keep a semi-chub while getting glass ground into half his body. The picture zoomed in on the soldier’s face: slack, slightly parted lips and wide jaw shaved smooth, emphasizing his youth. His blown-out pupils made the slate grey of his eyes barely visible, his expression so glassy and blank that Sam found his question answered. Steve had mentioned once, while they traveled the planet on the World’s Greatest Heroes: Fugitive Version Tour, that Bucky must have spent miserable weeks alone after Insight, detoxing from all the drugs HYDRA pumped into his system. Thinking about that now, Sam closed the video — he’d definitely had enough of sick HYDRA party games — and went searching for keywords. In a few minutes he’d found dozens of matches; he opened a file dated the same as the video and looked through it. Midway through the second page, he found a partial list:

It continued on the next page, but Sam didn’t need to see more. Anti-psychotics, mood stabilizers, and Viagra. Of fucking course.

Steve couldn’t get drunk because he metabolized the alcohol molecules before they bound to the GABA receptors in his brain. One of the documents Sam glanced at earlier implied that whatever they used on Barnes wasn’t quite so efficient, but tests were inconclusive because they didn’t bother to give the Winter Soldier more than the minimum metabolic calories he needed to perform adequately. Apparently drugs in high enough doses worked just fine on Bucky. The doses indicated here were probably appropriate for the metabolism and body mass of a blue whale.

Sam shook his head, amazed, and opened a folder on his desktop to copy the medications list, the roofing nail lobotomy, and the mind wipe session to send to Bucky’s lawyers. He then hunted around in the written files, having had enough of videos for a lifetime. He wished he could drink bleach and erase the images burned into his retinas.

Another document listed names, dollar amounts, and dates. Donations, maybe? Sam made a copy and dragged it into the desktop folder when a note at the bottom of the page caught his eye.

Sam stared at the words, trying to quell his suspicions. HYDRA couldn’t possibly be so stupid as to… Could they? He searched the files for “delta-mission.”

It turned out that HYDRA was in fact stupid and cruel enough to prostitute the Winter Soldier, in a variety of ways that catered to all sorts of tastes. The man’s increased stamina and quick healing made him a favorite toy, passed around the upper echelons of evil overloard society like a secret handshake.

Sam felt sick as he copied a few of those files as well. He hadn’t combed through everything in the flash drive, but he had enough for the lawyers to make a start on a solid defense. One that would likely involve parading what remained of Bucky’s dignity in front of strangers, ripping it to shreds, and pissing on the pieces.

Steve might have hesitated, mostly out of a desire to protect the man who always stood with him, but he ultimately would have released the information— Sam was damn sure of that. Steve’s motives were sometimes more complicated than they appeared to strangers. He didn’t like bullies, and would have been driven just as much by a need to see HYDRA brought low for abusing anyone like this as for his long friendship with Bucky. Which just chapped Sam’s ass further that Steve hadn’t seen this whole thing through, but dumped it all on Sam’s already overflowing plate. Sure, who deserved some R&R more than the man who signed up to fight in World War II and found himself playing ultimate frisbee with aliens in the New York City streets in 2012? But come the fuck on, man, they knew the goddamn HYDRA had a hundred razor-toothed heads, and even a purple space warlord with a ballsack for a chin dusting half the universe wasn’t going to wipe out the damage they’d done in seventy-odd years of duplicitous scheming. Steve Rogers would have marched into a courtroom with these sickening files and made every goddamn person view them until they agreed that justice for Bucky Barnes meant full exoneration. Captain America, wrapped in the colors of patriotism and gleaming with the glittery promises of freedom and democracy for all, needed to take a clear stand against the biggest bullies of all: the government determined to use the Winter Soldier as their scapegoat.

Sam didn’t want to be Captain America, but that didn’t mean he would stand by and let that legacy be ripped apart by HYDRA’s rotting tentacles. He cared too much about the world. Hell, he cared too much about the miserable fucker who tore off his wing and kicked him off a helicarrier.

For a given definition of cared, of course. A definition that absolutely did not involve actually caring about James Bucky Barnes. No, this was about justice, and making sure that everyone involved in HYDRA’s schemes got rooted out and made to pay for their crimes rather than letting Barnes take the fall for everything he had been forced to do.

It definitely had nothing to do with the utter defeat in bruised, grey-blue eyes staring miserably from the other side of prison plexiglass.

Sam had no intention of being actual friends with Bucky.

He’d inherited too much of Steve’s unfinished bullshit already.