Chapter Text
“Hey uh Cap, you don’t look too good,” said Stark.
Unsurprisingly, Captain Rogers didn’t reply. He was, rather obviously, unconscious.
“Earth to Rogers, anyone home?” Stark tried again.
“I don’t think that’s helping,” Clint grumbled from where he was cuffed to the wall.
“Well seeing as none of us can go check his pulse I figured asking was better than nothing,” Stark argued. To emphasize his point, he yanked dramatically against the metallic cuffs keeping him pinned to the cell wall. The cuffs were like none she’d seen before, and Natasha hadn’t been able to make them budge an inch. She suspected none of them could, except maybe Steve, who wasn’t in any shape to be breaking out of terrorist holding cells.
Rogers was held at the end of the rectangular cell, as distant from her, Clint, and Tony as was possible in the narrow space. Unlike the rest, his cuffs were attached to several feet of chain, which met a larger magnet that latched to the cell wall. His face was slack and bruised, but the real concern was the blood at his temple.
“He’s breathing,” Natasha found herself saying, though why she put effort into consoling these two was beyond her. Stark would continue to jabber on regardless.
“Think he got dosed with the same stuff they gave us?” said Clint.
Natasha glanced at him, using the excuse to check him once more for injuries. A sentimental habit, but she couldn’t help herself. Clint was a bit dusty, and maybe bruised, but he seemed otherwise fine. The three of them had woken up here not ten minutes ago. Beyond that, she didn’t know when or where they were. Her internal clock was going haywire. She couldn’t be sure if she’d been unconscious for ten minutes or ten hours. It put her on edge.
“Nah,” said Stark, “His metabolism’s too fast. They would have had to calibrate the drug specifically to the super serum.” He left unsaid that no one outside of SHIELD (and maybe Dr. Banner) had that kind of data on the super soldier serum. But the glance Stark shot her said that he was thinking it, and so was she. Everything about this mission - from the neo-Nazi decoys to the super-soldier-strength magnetic cuffs - pointed to Steve being the primary target. And there was usually one reason to keep a super soldier captive: test samples.
“He could be drugged,” Natasha said, “or his head wound is even worse than it looks.”
“Head wounds bleed a lot,” Clint added consolingly.
Looking at the pallor of Rogers’ face, Natasha didn’t think it was a question of superficial bleeding.
She scanned the room again in hopes of new information. But there wasn’t much to see. Same creepy drain in the floor. Same cameras in the corners of the ceiling. Same concrete walls. The only thing of interest was the high-tech cuffs. But the lack of identifiers only made the knot in Natasha’s gut coil tighter. Whoever had taken them was careful, and prepared. They had incapacitated four Avengers and been prepared to hold them in this facility . . . wherever that was. Natasha was under no illusions that they were still in Latvia, where the mission had started that morning (yesterday?).
Suddenly, Natasha felt her arms being yanked overhead. Her cuffs (as well as Clint’s and Tony’s) beeped to life, sliding her wrists up the wall until her butt just barely stayed on the floor. She heard Stark hiss across from her. He didn’t have great memories of being held hostage, she remembered. Frankly, she wasn’t a fan of it herself.
“Well that’s great,” muttered Clint, trying to adjust to his new situation and failing to find any way to make it more comfortable.
She was spared Stark’s response as the door to the cell clicked open. Two figures in white medical coats entered the room. The woman (mid-forties, brown hair, Eastern European origin) entered first, followed by her comrade. The man (thirties, overweight, identifiable snake tattoo on the back of his neck) followed with a small cart of what looked like medical tools. Scientists then, not mercs.
“What, no introductions?” Stark said as the pair beelined past him, Clint and Natasha. That coiling worry in her gut clenched. They wanted Rogers, just as she’d feared. That made the rest of them what - bargaining chips? Collateral damage? And pinned to the walls like bugs in a kid’s science project.
Can’t pick a lock when the cuffs have no locks, she thought miserably.
The woman handed the man (clearly her subordinate) a pair of garden shears.
“Hey now, before you get all snippy on the Cap maybe you can start with what you want,” said Stark. He was already visibly on edge at the sight of the tools.
“Don’t worry, Mister Stark, we’re only interested in getting the patient ready for his procedures,” said the woman. She had an annoying, almost prim sort of voice.
“I don’t recall Cap signing any patient consent forms,” said Clint, low and angry.
Ignoring this, the Doctor gestured impatiently to her assistant. “You’ll have to cut it off,” she instructed, “Easier to put him in scrubs than get that suit on and off.” The man got to work. He moved Steve’s limbs as though he were nothing more than a doll. As the Assistant turned him to cut along a seam, Natasha understood that Rogers had not been put in those long chains for comfort, but for easier access.
“Hey, don’t mean to interrupt your evil-doing but what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Stark snarled. “We have a strict no-touching-the-national-icon rule that I suggest you get on board with.” He thrashed against the restraints, resulting in a pathetic flail of the legs that Natasha would have found funny in any other situation. “Lady, can you hear me?”
The Doctor and her assistant had cut up the side of Cap’s leg and were peeling the fabric away. Even with the shears, it clearly took effort. Natasha felt an inkling of pride at Stark’s engineering. That suit didn’t give way without a fight.
But the tugging and maneuvering wasn’t without consequence. The magnet lowered through unseen means, causing Cap’s chains to clatter to the floor. With this new mobility, the Assistant unceremoniously dragged Cap by the feet until he was fully prone on the floor. His head hit the ground with a thud.
Steve let out a low moan. It was the first sign of life she’d seen from him since this mess started.
“Be fucking careful with him,” Clint snapped. Natasha watched him grind his teeth. It wasn’t that she wasn’t angry - бог she was angry. It was just that her anger felt subsumed at this moment by a roaring panic. What if they started cutting more than the suit? What if this Doctor decided she didn’t need all three extra hostages?
She would be useless to stop it. Utterly, pathetically, useless.
With cruel efficiency, the pair stripped off Cap’s boots and uniform pants. She noted with relief that there were no visible injuries on his legs. Then they jimmied a pair of scrubs onto him, a flimsy blue material you’d only see in hospitals. The tac vest gave them more trouble. They sawed at it for a solid ten minutes while Tony hurled less and less creative insults their way. Clearly, they had been trained not to engage with the likes of Stark. Everything about them screamed professional in a gut-twisting way.
But then the tac vest came away, and the Assistant muttered, “Well, shit,” breaking the illusion of professional detachment.
The Doctor gave a polite little laugh. It made Natasha want to strangle her. “Well,” she simpered, “I guess we should have assumed that the serum had attracted other interested parties.”
Natasha couldn’t see much of Steve through the bulk of the two evil scientists. Stark’s brow was furrowed and she read the confusion in his eyes. Clint was closest of all of them. He craned to see through the doctors and Natasha absorbed the sharp intake of his breath like a punch.
“Should have known he’d be in high demand, huh?” said the Assistant.
The Doctor didn’t seem to care about her assistant’s opinion. “Yes, well, hurry on to the blood draw.” Only when she had cleared away the rest of the Captain America suit, and the Assistant had turned to the cart for new equipment, could Natasha see what they were so fascinated by.
Rogers was positively covered in scars.
Angry red abrasions crawled from his hipbone and along his ribs. A patchwork of red and white lines crossed his torso. She noticed several raised puckers of skin - bullet wounds, or worse? But what Natasha couldn’t look away from was the awful burn over his heart. A skull and tentacles.
Hydra.
Her ears were ringing. This kind of horror, and the sheer brutality behind it, was not something even the Red Room masters would leave behind. Whoever had done this to Rogers had wanted him to remember it.
She’d always thought that someone’s vision going red was a literary turn of phrase. But as she looked at what had been done to her Captain, a blanket of red descended over her eyes.
“Back the fuck away from him,” said Clint, his voice dangerously soft. Natasha blinked, clearing the red. She had to focus. She dug deep within herself, pushed her emotions down, and buried them.
Stark, for his part, was white as a ghost and quieter than she’d ever seen him.
The Assistant dutifully drew Cap’s blood, taking vial after vial. An open wound at his shoulder, likely a bullet, seeped blood. Between his head injury, the bullet wound, and the blood draw, she swore she could see his skin losing color by the second.
“That’s enough,” Natasha snapped. “He’s injured. He won’t heal without blood and then you won’t have your guinea pig.”
The Doctor didn’t reply but she did halt the Assistant once he had filled the tenth - tenth - vial of blood. “That will do for now,” she said in that same superior tone.
The Assistant placed the butterfly needle and collection tubes back on the cart. He made to pick up the top half of the scrubs.
“No, leave it,” said the Doctor. “I do enjoy seeing a fellow scientist’s work.”
The pair appeared to have finished what they’d come to do and quickly exited with their cart. Natasha sent her best death glare, but they didn’t even spare her, Clint, or Tony a glance. That made her pulse shoot up again. She did not envy Steve, but she was beginning to worry that the rest of them were of very little importance to their kidnappers. And she knew what happened to expendable hostages.
The cell door buzzed to life. Some kind of electronic locking mechanism, then. The door, like their magnetic cuffs, would be a problem for Stark to solve.
It probably gave whoever watched them through the cameras satisfaction, but she couldn’t stop herself from turning back to Cap and his gruesome scars. His breathing was shallow, making the Hydra brand seem to ripple on his chest. She had seen Cap walk off a blast from a Chitari weapon. The thought of what had been done to him to leave such permanent marks . . . Natasha’s throat tightened.
“Did you know?” Clint asked the room. He didn’t need to clarify the question.
“No,” she said.
Stark shook his head, looking dazed. “He never said a word. Even Da - even Howard never mentioned it. There’s no record of him being captured during the war. None.”
Just then, Cap made a small noise. A whine, from the back of his throat. He shifted, rolling his head side to side.
“Cap? Take it easy there,” said Clint.
He tugged at his chains, but without any of his usual force. He looked ashen, and drugged, and frighteningly young. The light caught his dog tags where they hung next to the brand.
“B’cky?” he mumbled.
“We’re with you, Rogers,” Natasha said. “Just relax. We’re going to get you out of this.”
She couldn’t tell if he registered her words but a few moments later his body slumped back into unconsciousness. The puddle around his bullet wound continued to darken.
She wouldn’t say that she and Cap were close in the sense that people mean by close friends. They didn’t talk much about their personal lives. They didn’t have inside jokes. But, in the five months since the Chitari invasion, she’d run half a dozen Avengers missions and another dozen STRIKE tasks with him. She’d come to be familiar with his quiet presence at her side. He was reserved, too private some would say, but so was she. So while she didn’t really know Rogers, she respected him. More than that, she trusted him.
And she was going to get him out of here.
“Are we going to have a party?” she asked Stark. Meaning: Are any of your transmitters working? Thor was off-world, but Bruce and all of SHIELD would be looking for them.
“Forgot to send the invites,” said Stark. No, he hadn’t been able to send a distress signal before they’d been taken.
She briefly regretted vetoing Stark’s earlier campaign to implant them all with trackers. It had seemed like an invasion of privacy at the time. She hated to inflate his ego, but she was beginning to see the merits of his idea.
“Cuffs are magnetized,” she added.
“Obviously,” said Stark, annoyance in his tone.
She raised an eyebrow. Do you have a plan?
“I’m thinking,” said Stark. But his eyes were fixed on Rogers, and she wondered just what he was thinking about.
“He must be cold,” said Clint. Natasha followed his gaze to where Rogers lay prone on the concrete floor. The scrub-like material of the pants was so thin it was nearly see-through. Unlike her, Clint and Tony, they hadn’t even left him his socks. Clint noticed the same time she did.
“Maybe I can get my socks to him.” He contorted his body in a truly grotesque move that Natasha was equal parts revolted and impressed by. Using his mouth, Clint worked his socks off his feet, dropping them neatly in his lap.
“What’s step two, human pretzel?” Tony sneered.
“Hey,” said Clint, unusually sharp, “You do your thinking and I’ll do mine.”
Privately, Natasha agreed. The cell lapsed into a fraught silence.
-
Forty minutes later, Cap broke the quiet with a choked gasp. Everyone’s heads whipped toward him. He gave a violent shiver, then groaned. They watched as he painstakingly turned on his side, curling his body in on himself for warmth. His dog tags clanked against the floor. The handcuffs and chains caused his shoulders to twist strangely. It looked anything but comfortable.
His eyes fluttered. Open. Closed. Open.
“Hey man, how are you?” Clint asked. It was a little ridiculous to ask, but Natasha understood he was just trying to assess the damage. Seeing Rogers’ glassy blue eyes, she wasn’t sure he was in any state to be giving an injury report.
Cap mumbled something incomprehensible.
“I didn’t hear that,” said Clint, all easy patience, “Can you try again?”
She watched Rogers work his throat and swallow roughly. It reminded her of her own thirst. Surely they would get food and water soon? Unless testing for dehydration was one of the experiments these psychos intended to run on him.
Rogers seemed to muster his strength. He locked eyes with Clint, saying, “Hafta’ destroy the results.”
Clint turned to her with questioning eyes.
“He means whatever medical tests they’re running. With his blood,” Stark supplied. “Don’t worry, Cap. We’ll blow this place and all their data to kingdom come. And then we’ll blow it up again, just for fun.”
“Destroy . . . the . . . results,” Cap rasped out. He didn’t appear entirely lucid. But, at least he was conscious. She had no idea how long they had until the doctors came back.
“Steve,” Natasha began gently, “Do you have any idea who would be interested in the serum? Did either of the doctors look familiar?”
Rogers visibly flinched. “No doctors. No . . . doctors.”
Well, at least this was predictable. Rogers had a knack for avoiding SHIELD Medical. Looking at his scars, she thought she finally knew why.
Just then, the magnetic anchor of his chains beeped to life, slowly pulling him higher. Cap let out a pained moan, trying to get his feet under him. But the chains dragged him upright without care for his injuries. His jaw clenched. A sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead.
“Captain Steven Grant Rogers. 54985870.” He took a shuddering breath and repeated, “Captain Steven Grant Rogers. 54985870.” Another breath, another repetition. He pulled at the chains each time, but the enormous magnet didn’t budge.
Before the other Avengers could think how to react to this, the cell door buzzed open. The Doctor and her assistant had returned. Instead of the cart, the Assistant pushed a metal wheelchair.
“Hey, losers, what’s the name of your alma mater? Cause I’m filing complaints for medical malpractice!” Stark had officially lost the capacity for half-decent insults. He spewed nonsense about fake medical degrees as the pair crossed the cell.
“Pull him to stand,” the Doctor ordered. Someone beyond the room complied and the chains unceremoniously pulled Rogers up by the wrists. He let out a horrible noise as his head abruptly made contact with the wall. His chest heaved.
Once standing, the Doctor tried to shove the wheelchair behind him. Rogers was oblivious to her instructions, muttering the same refrain: Captain Steven Grant Rogers. 54985870.
Though she hadn’t eaten in many hours, Natasha felt she might throw up.
They finally wrestled him into the chair. The magnet deactivated from the wall, and the Doctor swiftly attached it to a connection point on the back of the wheelchair.
Only when the chair started moving did Rogers grasp that he was being taken away from the cell. He thrashed. The chair rocked wildly.
“No. No!”
“Captain,” said the Doctor, still sickly sweet, “Control yourself. If you don’t, it will be your friends taking your place.”
Steve’s panicked blue eyes swept the room. Natasha couldn’t be sure if he even recognized them - not in this state. But a steely resolve settled over him all the same. He stopped fighting, though his pulse ticked frighteningly fast at his throat.
“Steve, fight them. Don’t worry about us,” Natasha implored, but it was too late. He was their Captain. Even when he was barely aware of himself, he would protect them. There was no convincing him otherwise.
Instead, he spoke to his captors as they wheeled him away. “Bitte,” he said, “Bitte.”
She had never heard a worse sound - not ever in her life - than the quiet pleading of Captain America.
“Bitte schneide mich nicht noch einmal auf.”
Please don’t cut me open again.
Then he was gone.
The door buzzed shut after him.
A wave of self-loathing swept over her. She was useless to him. Utterly and pathetically useless to a man who, despite her past, despite the red in her ledger, would rather re-live his worst nightmare than risk her life. Looking at Clint and Tony, she saw her misery reflected back at her. All useless, and all absolutely sick over it.
Natasha thought she could not possibly feel worse.
Then the screaming started.