Chapter Text
Steve Rogers inspired loyalty, no question about that. After all, on the strength of a few laps around the Washington Mall, Sam had been willing to throw his non-enhanced, jeans-clad ass into a friendship that cost him his car, his wings, his freedom, and a good portion of his mental equilibrium. Getting snapped out of existence just added to the fun that was being Rogers’ wingman. And Sam was okay with it all, honestly. Unhappy and regretful about the five years Sarah struggled alone with the kids, yeah. Still a little pissed off about the car, but at least he’d been able to write it off — putting “brainwashed cybernetic centenarian assassin attack” on his insurance forms gave him some satisfaction — and get the last few payments waived. All in all, saving the world was a good gig, if minimally-paying, and honestly, for Steve, he would do it for free. Steve inspired that sort of gesture.
But then Steve bailed on the problematic present day and hightailed it back to the good ol' forties where being friends with a black man was apt to get him beat up. And Sam struggled not to blame him for that choice because Steve had lost so much, silver gilt flaking off the spangled star, and Sam couldn’t begrudge his friend a chance at happiness after the shitstorm they’d been through. Despite his words to the contrary, a part of Steve Rogers, chinos-clad and sepia-toned, remained rooted in the Greatest Generation. Sam understood, and while he felt no desire to take up that symbol of freedom for only the privileged few that Steve left him, he would defend the man’s legacy with all he had.
But the legacy of Steven Grant Rogers, Captain America, was a complicated one. To wit: one shield made of vibranium stolen from an African nation, painted in the colors of a colonizing country that could not seem to get its shit together without a national tragedy to bring out the hopes and prayers. One uniform made to support the enhanced strength and agility of a super-soldier without the ability to replicate the serum that had created him. The leadership of a fractured and fractious group of barely even work colleagues, some of whom operated in outer freaking space.
And of course, one traumatized and fucked-up war criminal with a metal arm who seemed determined in his grief to let himself be ground to bits by the United States judicial system.
The buzzer as he was let into the visitor’s station increased Sam’s headache. He took a seat at an empty booth and waited, trying not to feel how his skin crawled even though he was on the okay side of the plexiglass wall. After too long a time enduring the glare of the inmate three seats to his left who was arguing furiously about his drug bust with a city-appointed lawyer who looked approximately sixteen years old and about ready to cry, the buzzer sounded again and four guards walked in with their guns trained on the prisoner in their midst. The angry inmate and his baby-faced lawyer went quiet and stared as the guards approached with the same high-alert wariness they might have used to escort a rabid bear, or Loki.
Laden with half his weight in thick chains that bound his wrists to his belt and his ankles together, Bucky Barnes shuffled to the seat opposite Sam and fell into it, waiting patient and docile for a guard to unhook his wrists, thread the chain through a heavy ring on the table, and re-secure him.
Sam picked up the phone and waited while Bucky slowly did the same, looking at the receiver like it was alien technology before holding it to his ear.
“Jesus, man, what the hell happened to you?” Sam asked, appalled.
Bucky’s split lips peeled back from his white teeth, dry skin cracking open and oozing blood that welled up to the surface like a bloom. “Tripped,” he grunted, voice hoarse and scratchy. He coughed, clearing his throat; his Adam’s apple bobbed amid the purple and red blotches that mottled the skin of his neck. He’d shaved off the beard with his eyes shut, judging from the cuts along his jawline, and small bruises shaded blue and green on his pale, irritated skin. He had a black eye, too, scrapes along one side of face obscuring the small constellation of freckles there, and the damage extended under the collar of the white t-shirt he wore under his prison orange.
Most startling was the severe buzz cut that made his cheeks look hollowed out and his pale blue eyes look huge, swimming in bruises and shadows.
“You tripped,” Sam scoffed. “And what, fell onto someone’s fist?”
“Just tripped,” Bucky said flatly, giving him nothing but attitude.
Sam sighed. “Guess I don’t need to ask if they’re treating you okay.”
“I dunno. Three hots and a cot. ‘S not so bad.” Bucky unsurprisingly didn’t meet Sam’s gaze; he rarely looked at anyone directly except Steve. His thousand-yard stare remained fixed on his vibranium hand shackled to the table as if he couldn’t free himself with a flex of enhanced muscle. Although he felt weird about it, Sam continued to look him over, cataloging injuries that must have happened just that morning to still be raw. Everything he’d meant to say flew right out of his head in a wave of frustrated concern for this broken man who been left in Sam’s orbit like an abandoned satellite with its batteries slowly winding down.
“Who was it? Guards or inmates?”
Bucky didn’t answer and Sam slapped his palm down on the table to get his attention. Bucky jerked, glazed expression sharpening momentarily to something dangerous before subsiding again into something sullen and distant.
“What do you want, Sam?” he asked in that dry, painful-sounding croak.
“I want to know why you look like twenty miles of bad road, man,” Sam replied. “Your trial starts in two weeks and your lawyers say you won’t give them anything they can work with. What you did under HYDRA wasn’t your fault, you know that, and you shouldn’t have to pay for it. U.S. military law is real clear on that.”
Bucky’s mouth did some weird thing that might have been a pained smirk or just a residual twitch from seventy years of electrocution to his brain. “Pretty sure I fell off the military books when I put a bullet through JFK’s brainpan,” he said, shrugging his flesh shoulder. The metal arm remained static unless he made an effort to move it naturally or got too caught up in events to remember it was artificial, but Sam suspected at moments like this Bucky was ornery enough to purposefully emphasize his unnatural stillness. He totally understood how Bucky and Steve had been such great friends: both of them such stubborn assholes when they wanted to make a point. It amazed Sam that they survived Great Depression without anyone permanently rearranging their pretty faces; he wanted to kick the shit out of them both and he liked Steve.
“Look,” he said, leaning forward, “they don’t have anything they can prove, Bucky. You were” — a ghost story — “untraceable all these years. But even the shit on the highway and the Insight helicarriers can be dismissed if they have the unredacted files from Siberia. I know you have them somewhere. Give them to me. I’ll give what’s pertinent to your lawyers and they can work some legal magic. Prove to everyone that you weren’t legally responsible for any of it.”
Bucky spread his metal fingers wide on the counter, staring at the way the overlapping vibranium plates shifted in lieu of natural joints. It really was a marvel of engineering and technology, his arm. Sam wondered if he’d ever see it as more than a weapon.
“Legally responsible,” Bucky croaked. His split lip curled unhappily. “What difference does that make? Let them do what they want. Someone needs to pay.”
“HYDRA does,” Sam retorted. “Not you.”
“HYDRA’s gone. I’m here.”
“Fuck, man,” Sam grunted, losing the last of his patience. “Fine, you want to stay in these five-star facilities, knock yourself out. Enjoy the hospitality. You think Steve would want you to —”
“Steve,” Bucky snarled, abruptly holding Sam’s stare with his own furious gaze, “is not. Here. I am.”
“Listen —” Sam started, but before he could continue, the buzzer announced another inmate arriving to speak with a visitor. The burly guy — white, bearded, tatted up and all but screaming ‘mid-level gang boss’ — sauntered down the aisle behind the prisoners already seated, and though his expression didn’t change, Bucky’s breathing slowed and his body grew taut with tension. The guy paused, slapped meaty hands down on Bucky’s shoulders and leaned into his personal space.
“Don’t talk too much, zaychick,” he leered, “you want to rest that throat for later.” He added something else in Russian and rubbed Bucky’s shorn head possessively before continuing on his way, nodding amiably at the guard who shouted at him to move along.
Bucky said nothing, didn’t look up from the spot on the counter he’d fixed his gaze on, but red flared up the bruised sides of his neck and across his cheeks.
For too long a moment, Sam was left speechless. The instant his silence crossed from plausibly innocent confusion to suspicious awkwardness was marked by an inaudible sigh and flutter of Bucky’s lashes as he withdrew behind his emotional wall, shutting down even the smallest flicker of feeling.
“What…?” Sam swallowed hard. Dozens of terrible prison jokes occurred to him, none of which reassured him about his assumptions. “Bucky…”
“You should go,” Bucky said, and hung up the receiver. He looked back and motioned for the guards to collect him.
“No,” Sam said sharply, “wait. Bucky, sit down. Barnes! Pick up that goddamned phone right now, soldier,” he snapped with all the authority he could muster. Bucky responded instinctively to the tone his enhanced senses could perceive through the plexiglass; he had the receiver held to his ear again before he seemed to be aware of his movements. It twisted something in Sam’s gut to play the other man like that, to capitalize on seventy years of conditioning that even Wakanda’s advanced technology hadn’t been able to eradicate. He felt sick when he thought about what that innate obedience to orders meant for Bucky…what it implied about the livid bruises that mottled his skin.
“Fuck,” he muttered, observing Bucky’s wide grey eyes, the hint of a tremble at the corner of his soft mouth. Not for the first time, he felt a surge of real anger at Steve Rogers for fucking off back to white American utopia and leaving this mess behind. “Barnes, I need those files. I need that intelligence to be sure we’ve dismantled HYDRA completely,” he said, hoping that duty would take over where self-preservation obviously failed.
Bucky’s affectless gaze focused somewhere on Sam’s left shoulder, or perhaps Mars, but eventually he nodded. “Okay. I’ll get them to you,” he said.
“Great,” Sam breathed a sigh of relief. “Where —?”
“But Sam,” he continued tonelessly, “be sure you want to know before you open them.” And before Sam could respond, he hung up the receiver again. This time he turned away, refusing to look back as the guards came and unlocked him from the table, shackled him tightly again, and escorted him back into the depths of the high-security prison to suffer for HYDRA’s crimes.
Still loyal to Steve Rogers, despite being abandoned.