He’s starving. His whole body is aching painfully with an overwhelming need to eat. His head swims, vision warping and coming in and out of blackness. His body feels heavy, heavier than the chains and restraints around him, even. His stomach has been groaning and twisting painfully for days, and his mouth has gone dry from lack of anything to drink. He feels like he’s drying up, like he’s been beached. He wants food, he needs water, but he can’t.
He won’t get food or water, he doesn’t know for how long, but a long time, he’s sure. Bucky— The Soldier- thinks distantly, with a bitter hint of amusement, that maybe he’ll die before he ever has another meal or has a drop of water fall against his tongue.
He’s being punished, though. That is all. He tried to escape, he wounded one of their best guards; broke his nose until there was blood gushing, snapped fingers like twigs in the metal of the soldiers hand, hit and shoved and fought until he was a heap on the ground. Then, he’d ran. He can’t quite remember, they wiped him after, but Bucky the soldier doesn’t think he even made it to the door.
He can still hear one of his commanders’ voice, bouncing off of the huge, metal walls, echoing in his ears in the empty room. “Ya know, Winter, my dog used to bite,” he’d said, gripping the soldiers face tightly, making him look up at him from where he was kneeling on the hard stone floor. “But I stopped feedin’ it every time it snapped at me.”
The soldier had listened with the upmost obedience, but fear had still thrummed through its body. Anxiousness, fear, such potent emotions, potent smells. He smells no fear on the commander when he spits out the last words. He radiates confidants, amusement. “He don’t bite no more.”
He has no reason to believe this, other than the fact he has a hazy, maybe memory, bouncing around somewhere in the back of his head, but he thinks he might wake up (after it’s all too much, and he passes out purely from lack of sustenance) in an infirmary, or where they wipe him, the soldier isn’t sure, but he thinks he’ll be strapped down- certainly strapped down, and he’ll have an iv stuck into his arm, his neck, maybe? They’ll shove thick, tasteless things down his throat, sludgy and awful, grainy; and then his punishment will be over.
He has no reason to trust this. He cannot trust the things his brain supplies him, like the idea to fight, to flee. Still, the idea is almost pleasant, almost a welcomed idea. He thinks he wouldn’t mind his body giving up, the pain and the gnawing hunger just stopping. They won’t let him die, they never have- too important, but they can bring him close. A little time, a little persuasion, the soldier will be good as new and ready to comply. This is simply his punishment.