Frozen Panic
He wades towards consciousness through clingy molasses, fighting his way towards wakefulness the way he’s been fighting for as long as he can remember. And something is wrong.
He first notices the metal. He’s lying on a metal surface, sapping what little warmth there is in his body, and he is cold. That’s alright. That’s familiar. There is so little familiar in James’ world. He takes a breath - warm air, no antisceptics, no disinfectants, one person, metal and oil, one person, one person, he can escape one person, he can kill one more person - and feels the straps holding him down. The panic sets in immediately once everything in his mind slots together. He is on an operating table, strapped down, a bright light above him.
But something is wrong.
The Winter Soldier bites down on the panic, and his teeth grind together. No mouth guard. No protection for his tongue when he bites down. Oh.
He takes another breath, slowly, feeling the straps bite into his chest, his thighs. No pain. He tries to move, clenches his muscles against his restrains, pushing his upper body against the table. No pain.
His eyes flutter open again against the bright light, and James Bucky knows he’s crying. Tears blur the light and run down his temples into his hair. He takes another breath. It doesn’t hurt. The absence of pain is jarring, he knows he’s breathing too fast, tasting the air around him because he can and having a panic attack at the same time. He can feel his heart racing against his ribcage, his body trembling with adrenaline, and none of it hurts. He can’t really make out his shoulder anymore and it’s disorienting, as that’s where his body usually radiates from.
And suddenly there’s warmth. James gulps for air, the sudden contact shocking him back into his body, his lack of pain that is so much more disorienting than waking up strapped to a table in a place and time he doesn’t know.
“Easy there, soldier. Deep breaths.”
He knows that voice. His mind races, but there is nothing for it to find. Memory has always come slowly to him, if it comes at all. The Winter Soldier survives on instinct and conditioning. He says and does whatever will avert pain.
“Ready to comply.” He matches the handler’s language. He doesn’t know where he is, but going by the accent, the US. He doesn’t know why he knows that. The handler stiffens, the touch retreats, and the Soldier is once again faced with the complete absence of pain in him. He wasn’t sure he was made up of anything else, and now that it’s gone he doesn’t quite know what to do. Who he is.
“Do you know where you are?” The words are gently, and he knows he’s heard this voice before. He doesn’t recall. How long was he gone? How long were the Minutes? Minutes?
The Winter Soldier stays quiet. Information will be supplied or he’s expected to figure shit out by himself. He’s good at that. He looks up into the light and starts.
“You’re in the Avengers compound, in my lab, to be exact,” the handler continues, and he realises that the first thing that’s wrong is that word. This is not a handler. The man touched him, and it didn’t hurt. He is answering his questions. The Soldier doesn’t need to know where he is, especially not exactly. He just needs to know where to go. This is wrong.
“Sorry for knocking you out, winter wonder, but I think it worked out. How are you feeling?”
The memories come rushing in like an avalanche. Pain. So much pain. New pain, old pains, he can’t tell. Stark’s face on the new, Stark kids face on the news, nothing like his father and everything like his mother. Her bones, Maria’s bones under his hand. The shock as they crack reverberating up into his shoulder. His shoulder, it hurts so bad. He doesn’t know where to go. People are looking for him, Steve is looking for him. Terror, he can never go back, he has no idea why, but the Winter Soldier runs on instincts, so he runs. He runs and runs and each step is hell, each breath is fire. Stark’s face, the Stark kid’s face on the news.
And then the decision to die. Mission failure, Soldier. James flinches and he can hear Tony Stark stumble back. There are straps holding him down, just two, and he wonders if the kid is as smart as the father. He’s torn through them in no time, rolled off the table and has a back to the wall.
He feels like he’s been here before a man and three suits, glowing eyes and piercing eyes on him, pinning him down. Stark stands before him in jeans and a tanktop, not even wearing the iron gloves he wore last time. He has his empty and up, a gesture of peace belied by the three weapons behind him. One weapon versus four, those odds never worked well for him. He’s always been the weakest of the Winter Soldiers, version 1.0.
Memories of the other soldiers come rushing in, fights and pain and broken bone. Torn skin, torn hair, torn limbs, bodies suspended in golden fluid. A torn limb. A torn arm. Blinding pain and heat. But there is no pain right now.
James is panting from the memories, the sensory overload grinding into his skull, despite the silence around him.
“Easy there. How’s the arm? I tried to patch it up, but I’ve never worked with that kind of tech. If you tell me how you’re feeling we can work on it.”
Stark’s voice is low and smooth, he talks like a waterfall, like a river, words flowing around him as a gentle caress. James wants to listen to him for the rest of his life. But the words run out and there is silence, filling up with his breath, with his racing heart. The Winter Soldier looks up and realises that Stark is watching him. Expecting him to fill the silence with words. Answers. Alright. He can try.
“How long?” Always his first question. It rarely gets answered, but this is not a handler. This is the son of the man he killed, the woman he murdered. Stark’s eyes on him are calculating, the Soldier knows the look of a man running five thoughts at the same time, but they are not unkind. Another entirely unfamiliar sensation.
“You were out for an hour and eight minutes. Again, sorry about that.”
“You’re alive. Don’t apologise.” The memories of an hour and eight minutes ago are a blur, James mostly remembers pain. He remembers trying to talk, words he rehearsed again and again while he waited in the dark. Now language seems to come somewhat easier, and he wonders if that is the newly found absence of pain, or Stark.
“Well, so are you. Care to share your current thoughts on that point?”
He hasn’t thought about that point yet. James considers it. Considers himself. Alive.
“What now?” His own voice is rough in his throat, it sounds terribly foreign. Stark lifts an eyebrow, and Bucky feels himself being inspected. Something about that is horrible, he wants it to stop. But he is in Stark’s workshop, and Stark didn’t kill him. He owes the man.
“Do you have somewhere to go?” A memory of Steve’s apartment drifts into his mind, and Bucky recoils from the thought with a force that surprises him. He has no idea where this aversion is coming from, what he is averse to, but he doesn’t question his instincts.
“No,” James answers at the same time as one of the suits shifts forward, placing a hand on Stark’s shoulder. A sensory memory of metal on inflamed painful flesh flashes through James and he lets it get stuck in his throat rather than escaping. Stark turns to the suit and the Soldier takes the moment to glance down at his shoulder. The shoulder that doesn’t hurt anymore. The flesh there is still inflamed and disgusting to look at, scars radiating out from the metal biting into him. But it doesn’t really hurt anymore. Only a dull throbbing he would never have noticed if he hadn’t tried.
“Okay then, Sergeant, me and the boss man have some options for you.” Sergeant. The word rams through him like ice and he gulps for air, his hand pressed to his chest in a motion he didn’t make, pressing down against pain that isn’t there. But he knows is coming. Smile, Sergeant, it’ll be easier then. Smile for me, Sergeant Barnes. A woman’s voice, young and sweet the way juniper berries are sweet, seeping through his like red light.
“Barnes?”
Stark sounds worried, and Barnes takes a deep breath. He rights himself and looks up at Stark, biting down everything else, the light, the voice, the lack of pain. He can fall apart on his own time. Right now he needs to function.
“Options,” he repeats the last command it wasn’t a command, you’re getting it wrong. Stark continues to look worried, but also continues to talk.
“Colonel Rhodes is watching,” he says, pointing to the suit that touched him. “He’s the one who runs the avengers and the compound, I just own the damn thing.” Stark grins then, a tense thing, but it makes the Winter Soldier falter all over again. He knows that expression, the strain of hours of doing this, talking until his throat hurts, except he can’t feel it, doesn’t know it’s there. His voice ragged and his face hurts and his shoulder hurts and it all comes back now, not then.
“He’s the one that can talk long term options. I’m here as the short term fix-it. So, the arm, Barnes. Are you in pain?”
Third time’s the charm. Barnes swallows something like memories and gratitude and tries to form words.
“I don’t know. No. I don’t think so.”
Stark’s eyebrows knit up even further, and Barnes finds he doesn’t like being the cause of that frustrated look.
“Alright. While you were out I tried to clean up my mess from Siberia, insulated the wires and took out the melted useless crap. But again, never done this before.”
Siberia, he remembers Siberia. He remembers cold and Steve talking and he remembers terror above all else. Terror running through his body, using every bit of his strength and training to keep it still, to look around the room where he’s been taken apart into pieces and sharpened into something monstrous.
Stark before him notices the shift, the suits around him moving closer. “Will you let me look at it?”
Let the mechanic look at it. A routine check up, maintenance. Helps with the pain. Barnes nods slowly. This is familiar, but familiar means it will hurt, and right now he’s free of that. But that’s Stark’s work. Stark freed him of the pain.
Stark breathes out slowly and forces himself to smile, gesturing towards the table that couldn’t hold the Winter Soldier. There are tools there, small sharp silver things, and the fear too is familiar. Barnes lets it run through him, feels it as the companion that it is, and walks to his mark.
“Just sit here, this wont take long.” And then Stark stils. He’s been moving this entire time, shifting his weight, running his fingers over the seams of his jeans, gesturing when he talks. But now he has one tool in his mouth, another in his hands and everything about him stils, focuses. Barnes can’t help but watch.
Stark spits out the tool in his mouth, shifting the other fluidly into the pocket of his jeans. “Looks good from here. I’m going to poke around a bit at the insulation. You shouldn’t feel anything, but try not to take my head off if you do,” he jokes, too focused to see the Iron Man suits stir with concern. Barnes knows it’s a joke. Still. He curls his hand around the edge of the table, determined to destroy the metal before he lets himself hurt Stark.
It’s strange. He can feel the tools inside his shoulder cavity. He can feel a metal point hit bone, feels it radiate into his ribcage. But there is no pain. Barnes slowly lets go of the breath he’d been holding.
“It doesn’t hurt.”
Stark looks up at his muttered words, a beaming smile on his face, and James feels like he’s looking into the sun. “That’s what we like to hear around here, wonderful. If you want I can wrap it up so you don’t get the wires tangled in anything.”
“It’s fine.” Again that face, a though Barnes can’t really parse out flashing through Stark’s eyes. Maybe it’s pity. James isn’t too familiar with that one.
“Offer stands, just let me know. Uhm, for now, Rhodey is currently dying a thousand deaths outside the door. Are you okay to talk to him?” The Winter Soldier doesn’t so much remember Colonel Rhodes as he has an impression of him. The impression of his body on his memory, the way Maria Stark has left an impression, hundreds of impressions.
“Did I hurt him?” Stark falters, taking a step backwards.
“No, not directly.” That doesn’t mean much. But James is looking into the eyes of the man whose parents he killed. James knows that he likely ruined Stark’s life, at the very least parts of it. He’s not sure he can do it again, but he knows he doesn’t deserve the choice.
“Colonel Rhodes will decide what happens with me.”
“Na uh, the boss man is not deciding anything here,” Stark immediately interjects. “He’s here to give you options, Barnes. You choose.”
Barnes looks into the kind brown eyes of Tony Stark and realises he’s very far away from anything familiar.