Chapter Text
The boredom was familiar, he thought as he shifted in the front seat of their latest vehicle. The dull monotony of nothing constantly undercut with a thin, vibrating layer of anxiety and anticipation: the same in the front seat of a fucking hideous orange 1973 Chevrolet in rural Georgia as it was in the back of a humvee bumping down a dusty road in Afghanistan. His fingers twitched against the denim of his pants and he wished he had a cigarette, some candy, anything. He could feel Steve’s gaze on him, but he kept his eyes on the fields blurring past them, ignoring the faint ghost of Steve staring at him reflected on the glass of the window. He’d just finally broken the man of his habit of asking if Sam was sure he wanted to come with him every five minutes. He’d hate to have it start up again just because Sam felt like he was about to vibrate out of his skin.
Sam took in a slow, deep breath, the scent of dusty old upholstery and stale cigarette smoke filling his lungs as he stared out the window and forced himself to run over their current mission one last time. The intel from Tash had been sketchy. It usually was, but it was enough to send Sam and Steve spiraling down through Georgia from where they’d been checking out an abandoned farm in Ohio. The farm hadn’t been anything important anyways, a sad piece of land that a guy had told a guy had told a friend of Clint’s that he’d seen a dude with a metal arm hiding out on (there hadn’t been anything there, there never was).
They were on a back highway south of Atlanta, east of Columbus, the kind of place that never made it onto any maps. The only signs of human habitation were the occasional dilapidated farms, small towns that sagged with the desperate weight of poverty. The kind of places that made Steve’s hands clench on the steering wheel. Sam wasn’t sure if it was because the sight of so many people abandoned by their government set off the righteous rage that Sam had seen so often since he’d met Steve, or if it was because the poverty reminded Steve of his own childhood. Sam thought he might even work up the nerve to ask, maybe once they hit the one year anniversary of their fucked up meandering back and forth across the forgotten back roads of America.
The Hydra installment they were going to check out was unusually located in the middle of nowhere. More often, Hydra tended to favour major centres where they could wield the greatest influence over politicians and their ilk; cities like Toronto, New York, Las Vegas. The last time they’d followed one of Tash’s threads to a rural base – that hadn’t been just a farmer with a penchant for weapons stockpiling, or a fringe doomsday cult – it had been to an underground facility near the Three Sisters in the Rockies. Sam’s brain still shied away from the memory of what they’d found there. The facility hadn’t been big, but it had been deep, buried under layers and layers of rock. A fine layer of dust lay over everything but Sam still swore he could hear screams echoing through the hallways, the ghosts of the twisted bodies they’d found there pressing down on him, making his blood run hot and cold as he threw up in a corner.
“I remember…” Steve had said, voice soft and wrecked, and Sam was so fucking grateful that he didn’t finish that thought. He didn’t want to know what memories the sight of small bodies tossed into a pile in the corner like garbage would bring up for the other man. They’d burned that place, once they’d searched the whole thing, Steve checking every paper file twice before they’d dropped a homemade bomb down the elevator shaft and watched a red flower bloom deep in the earth, stories and stories below them. Sam didn’t know, as they left, if Steve felt relieved or not that they hadn’t found any sign that Barnes had ever been in that particular slice of hell. Sam was too numb to feel much of anything, not even the familiar frustration that had begun to hang over both of them like a cloud the longer they went without finding a sign of the other man. Not a stray file, not a chair like the one in the photos Tash had given them, like the one Maria had unearthed in a bank vault in DC. It was looking more and more likely that the file that Tash had given them had been the only existing intel in the world on the Winter Soldier. If the guy hadn’t ripped a steering wheel straight out of his hands, Sam would be tempted to say they’d hallucinated him.
“We’re almost there,” Steve said, interrupting Sam’s reverie. Sam swallowed, throat clicking, and he found himself praying that the small farm they were driving to would hold nothing other than an angry old white man with a pile of AK-47s who’d yell racist shit at Sam until he and Steve left. He couldn’t believe that was the better option.
They were using an approach that had worked well for them in the past – going in with weapons nearby but not drawn, dressed in their civvies. No matter how many times his and Steve’s faces had been plastered across the news, people just didn’t expect Captain America and the Falcon to show up on their front porch, covered in dust and rocking plaid button-ups. Hydra agents or just ordinary civilians, the tactic worked on both. Of course, it was always better to approach stealthily, but sometimes that wasn’t an option, especially in middle-America. It was the best approach they had come up with for farmland where there was no cover to hide their arrival at a building, no high vantage point to observe from. Sam was sure that there was some fancy equipment that could make up for those two circumstantial difficulties, and not for the first time he bemoaned their decision to blow up a chunk of the United States government. Running stealth missions was so much easier when every security agency in the country hadn’t just narrowly decided to not try you for treason.
Not that he actually regretted it, but some days he felt like he would kill for even the smallest bit of tactical support.
The truck jostled roughly as they left the highway, turning onto a dirt track marked by a no exit sign pockmarked with holes from buckshot. Sam grabbed ahold of the roof handle as they bounced over potholes, tires spitting up gravel as they sped along, a cloud of dust rising in their wake. A particularly large hole had Sam almost biting his tongue as his ass actually left his seat, and he grimly swore to himself that he didn’t care how it affected their cover, the next town they hit he was making Steve trade in this truck for a new one with actual suspension (and AC that worked).
Both men were staring intently out of the front window when they finally emerged from the treeline, a large clearing suddenly opening up in front of them. At the end of the dirt track they could just make out a large farm house, almost completely obscured by the decaying barn in front of it. Painted on the roof and walls of the barn, in meter high letters, was ‘Hell is here’. Sam felt ice run down his spine, something about it making his stomach twist, though he and Steve had passed hundreds of signs just like it as they drove across the country. Steve slowed down, whether intentionally or not, as they drew nearer to the small collection of buildings in the centre of the field. That no one had come running out at them yet – or shot at them – boded well for the place being abandoned by whoever had written those words. Sam found himself again hoping for some crazy old white folks, because whether a warning or a promise, he didn’t want to know what Hydra would consider hell. Not after what they’d found at Three Sisters.
Steve pulled to a stop right in front of the wide front porch, and they sat in silence.The only sounds were those of insects and birds and the steady clicking of the truck’s engine cooling. They stayed in the cab of the truck for a moment, both peering up at the house, checking for movement. There was none, other than a flicker of a curtain blowing through a broken window pane. Half the windows were boarded up, paint flaking from the walls, and the roof of the porch was sagging alarmingly.
“Well,” Steve said, and Sam looked over at him to see the other man still staring up at the house.
“Yeah,” Sam said, and climbed out of the truck, feet kicking up dust as he landed on the ground. They’d done this enough times now that they had established a pattern – a well-practiced dance. Steve left his shield in the truck – plausible deniability in case there were people around who weren’t Hydra – but both he and Sam tucked Glocks into the holsters on the back of their jeans. Both men tugged their shirts in unison as they rounded the truck and approached the farmhouse, making sure the tails of their shirts were covering their weapons. The porch let out loud groan when Steve stepped on it, causing him to freeze where he stood, one foot on the last step, one foot on the worn wood of the porch. Sam opened his mouth to–
“Not a fucking word,” Steve whispered, and Sam laughed silently.
“I wasn’t gonna say anything,” he said quietly as he stepped up onto the porch next to him. “Though I know for a fact you didn’t eat a big breakfast.” They hadn’t had breakfast at all actually, driving without stopping for half a day to get to this speck on the map before the sun set. They both paused, looking at the door, the boarded-up windows framing it. Sam sighed, stepping in front of Steve and ignoring his indignant huff of breath. He glanced at the uncapped wires sticking out of the wall where a doorbell might have once hung, before rapping his knuckles against the doorframe instead. The chirping of the cicadas kept them company as they waited. Sam strained his hearing for any sounds coming from within the house, though he knew Steve would catch anything long before he had any hope of hearing it. After several long minutes of silence, Steve gestured them forward, both men drawing their guns and moving in sync to enter into the silence of the house. The door creaked loudly as they opened it, making Sam wince as they lost any element of surprise they might have once had. Still, at least it wasn’t locked, and they made their way inside, quickly clearing the first floor. The space between Sam’s shoulder blades was itching, though they found no signs that anyone had been there for a couple months at least. There was graffiti on the walls of what used to be the living room, but which now only contained a threadbare couch along with empty bottles and cigarette butts. Even those were dusty, coated with the grime that was slowly seeping into every corner of the abandoned building.
Sam gestured to Steve, making it clear that he would be taking lead as they moved up the stairs, and Steve nodded his acquiescence. They cleared the upper floors as quickly as they’d cleared the first, the rooms empty but for the sand slowly accumulating in the corners, blown in where the boards didn’t quite meet the edges of the window frames. A couple of the rooms were so dark they were forced to pull out their flashlights, holding them next to the barrels of their guns as they swept the room. In one room, painted sunflower yellow, there was a doll lying face down, dress mouldering and hair half-gone, stolen by some animal to line its nest. It was amazing, Sam thought, looking down at it, how something so mundane, and something so cliché, could still unnerve him. The fact that the prickling feeling of being watched hadn’t faded at all didn’t help, even as they made their way back down the stairs. Steve found the door to the basement in the kitchen, and they cleared that next, the stale air smelling of mould and decay. The furniture and boxes shoved into that dark space carved out of the earth threatened to become something grotesque and monstrous as their flashlight beams swept over them, but nothing materialized out of the darkness. After checking and then double checking for any sort of secret entrance, they returned back to the first floor without incident.
“Barn?” Sam asked as they paused in the kitchen. Steve shrugged.
“Yes,” he said, but Sam could tell that he had already mentally categorized this farm as yet another dead end. Sam wanted to agree with him, but there was still something about the place that made his skin crawl and set his teeth on edge. Something that couldn’t be explained by anything they’d seen so far.
The porch once again groaned ominously under their feet as they stepped into the sunlight. Dry grass rustled against the legs of their jeans as they crossed the yard, the sun warm against Sam’s head. You could feel the temperature difference as they entered the shadow of the barn, and Sam couldn’t help but shiver as he looked up at the giant structure, noticing for the first time that the side facing the house also had words painted on the side.
“God has abandoned us”, Sam read aloud.
“Jesus,” Steve said, looking up at the flaking black letters, and Sam huffed out a laugh.
“Yeah,” he said, “I’m starting to feel like we’re in a really shitty B-rated horror movie.” Steve turned to him with a grin.
“Well then, want to play the part of the dumb teenagers who enter the obviously haunted old building, while the audience screams at them to stop?” Sam raised an eyebrow at him.
“Wow Steve, please tell me more about how well you understood that reference.” Sam shook his head, walking towards the half-open doors of the barn.
“Watch out Sam. The black guy always dies first,” Steve said quietly, easily catching up as Sam disappeared into the shadow of the entrance way. Sam flipped him off without looking, Steve’s quiet laughter trailing after him as he stepped into the barn.
“Yeah, unless the stupid white boy he’s with always insists on acting like a suicidal maniac at the first sign of danger,” Sam muttered under his breath as he took stock of his surroundings. The interior of the barn was fairly well-lit, largely thanks to the large gaps between the boards that made up the walls, and the holes in the ceiling where planks had collapsed.
“Shit,” he heard Steve say from behind him as he joined Sam inside the barn. “Think it’s gonna collapse on us?”
“Just try and resist the urge to throw your frisbee around and we should be fine,” Sam said.
“I left that in the truck, remember?” Steve said as he stepped around Sam to peer into the empty stall next to the door.
“Right, yeah, we need to talk about that truck,” Sam said as he crossed the straw-covered floor to check the stall on the opposite side.
“What’s wrong with the truck?” Steve asked. “It’s an American classic.”
“One,” Sam said, “no, it isn’t. Two, my ass is fucking bruised because that piece of shit has no fucking suspension. Plus the AC is broken. It’s August, Steve. August. In Georgia. I’m pretty sure this violates some sort of international law about torture.”
“It’s not that bad,” Steve said mildly, and Sam snorted his disagreement as he nudged at a pile of straw with his foot. The sound startled a pair of pigeons nesting in the rafters, and their guns swung up at the noise. They both watched as the birds circled the open space of the loft of the barn before settling back down.
“Do you even know what that means? American classic?” Sam asked as they both reached the last stall in their rows.
“No,” Steve admitted easily, “but Tash keeps referring to random shit as American classics just to fuck with me.”
“How long did that take you to figure out?” Sam asked, raising an eyebrow. Steve smiled back at him.
“I’m not telling,” he said.
“That long eh?” Sam laughed, walking across boards to join Steve in the centre of the room. “I don’t think there’s anything h-,” he started as he approached, but Steve held up a hand, frowning, and Sam froze, raising his gun, every sense in his body instantly screaming to full awareness as his eyes swept over their surroundings. After a long moment of silence, Steve cocked his head to the side.
“Walk back a couple of steps,” he said, and Sam did, walking forward again when Steve beckoned him to. Steve stopped him at the same spot as before, walking over to join Sam.
“Steve-” Sam started.
“It’s hollow,” Steve interrupted, and Sam swallowed. Shit. It could be a root cellar, he told himself as he bent over to help Steve move the straw covering the wooden boards they were standing on. He knew it wasn’t though, knew even before Steve lifted the wooden trapdoor to reveal a steel one beneath it. His instincts had been saying it ever since they’d seen the barn and he knew that whatever they found beneath that steel door was just going to add another layer or terror to his nightmares. He watched as Steve crouched down, bracing himself as he curled his fingers around the edge of the metal, pulling it open with a teeth-grinding screech of metal rending.
“Fuck,” Sam said with feeling as they both stared down the narrow circular tunnel plunging into the earth, a metal ladder anchored to the wall on one side.
“I won’t be able to get the shield down there,” Steve said, eyeing the width of the circular opening in the earth, the maw waiting to swallow them both whole.
“Will you even be able to fit your shoulders in there?” Sam asked, and Steve laughed as if Sam wasn’t completely serious.
“Let’s get some more gear,” he said, and shoved the door back over the entrance so that he’d hear if someone tried to get out while they went back to the truck. Sam felt his stomach roll over in nausea as he thought about how narrow that tunnel was. There would be no room for them to maneuver if anyone came for them while they were going down, whether from above or below.
“Steve…” he said, trailing off, knowing that the other man had noticed the same thing as he had.
“Yeah,” Steve said. His lips turned white where they pressed together hard as he looked at Sam seriously. “We can drop a flare down, see how far it goes. If it’s not too far I can just jump straight down. If someone is waiting they won’t expect that.”
“And if it’s too far for you to jump?” Sam asked. “Maybe… maybe we should call for backup.”
“Someone’s still going to have to go down that hole first, eventually,” Steve said in a tone that Sam had come to both recognize and dread.
“Yeah so why the fuck not have it be you,” Sam said.
“Sam…”
“Yeah, yeah,” Sam said, waving his hand. “Drop the fucking flare, then we can argue about it.”
They stripped efficiently, standing in the hot afternoon sunlight, dust rising in the air around them as they shuffled around in their underwear, pulling on their suits, Steve in the same stealth suit he’d worn when he was working for SHIELD, Sam in a white, red, and black suit modelled after Steve’s. Sam could feel sweat beginning to drip down his spine as he tightened the last straps of his uni- his suit (not a uniform, no matter how many times he almost called it that, because what organization would have them now?). Steve grabbed flares, and both men switched their flashlight batteries for new ones, as well as grabbing extra ammo and a Ka-Bar each. Sam glanced at the mic sewn into the left cuff of his sleeve, very aware, as he had been every time he and Steve did shit like this over the last however many months, that there was no backup for them. They could technically communicate with the Avengers through the mics Stark had installed in their suits – at the very least they could get ahold of Stark’s AI – but the chances of someone getting to them in time were small, so fucking small, smaller even than when Sam had been behind enemy lines in airspace that no chopper would ever dare enter. He raised his head to find Steve looking at him, and they shared a look of understanding before turning as one and heading back to the inside of the barn. The door hadn’t moved from where Steve had dragged it back into place – no surprise, since even if Sam hadn’t heard it, Steve certainly would have caught the sounds of anyone trying to move the warped steel. Steve grabbed the door with one hand, moving the plate, which probably weighed about 200lbs, with as much effort as Sam would use to move a bag of groceries.
“Show-off,” Sam muttered under his breath, and though Steve didn’t respond Sam could see his smile as he bent over to peer down into the hole. Straightening, he pulled out a flare, lighting it. He shared a look with Sam over the flying sparks of the bright light, before releasing his grip on it. Both men leaned forward to watch as the red light fell, turning and tumbling into the darkness beneath them, growing smaller and smaller until it suddenly stopped.
“Two stories,” Steve said.
“Fuck off,” Sam said, raising his head to look at Steve, who was already looking mulish. “Three at least. Maybe four.”
“Two,” Steve repeated. “And even it is four, I’ve jumped from that height before.”
“Not straight down,” Sam argued. “Your fucking legs will shatter Steve, don’t be fucking stupid.” Steve’s expression twitched.
“No, no, Ste-” Sam started, jerking forward, but it was too late. His fingers closed on nothing as his stupid fucking idiot of a friend stepped into empty air and was gone. “Fuck,” Sam said with feeling, dropping to his knees and staring down into the darkness beneath him. The flare was gone, presumably obscured by Steve’s body, but who the fuck knew. A long, painful minute of silence passed, stretching out, and Sam swore he could feel every single beat of his heart beneath his skin as he waited. Then, blooming out of the darkness, the flare, and Steve’s stupid face looking up at him. The supersoldier grinned up at him, holding up two fingers.
Sam was going to fucking murder him.
Steve was going to have to wait for Sam to murder him though, as Sam took a moment to make sure that he had all of his equipment in place before turning and stepping down onto the first rung of the ladder. Sam kept a steady litany of complaints in his head as he climbed down, the ladder free of dust and rust in a way that Sam was trying to not to find significant, focusing instead on cursing out Steve in his head. It would be much more satisfying, he thought, if he could actually voice any of those once he got down to Steve, but shouting at the other man would definitely throw whatever element of surprise they might have straight out the window.
It took him longer than he would have liked to climb down, the tunnel so narrow it was actually hampering his movements, forcing him to keep his arms bent at strange angles to keep his elbows tucked him, but finally he reached the bottom, jumping down the last few feet as soon as he cleared the entrance. Steve grinned at him as he turned to face the other man. Sam made sure to tell him just what he thought of Steve’s recklessness through several very creative hand gestures that had Steve biting down on his lip, trying not to laugh, before he turned to survey their surroundings.
They were standing in a hallway that branched out in two directions from where they had entered. Aside from a small pile of dust and straw that had fallen down the shaft when they’d breached the facility, the hallway was spotless, walls, floor, and ceiling all the same smooth steel. There were no visible lights, other than the fading red glare of the flare in Steve’s hand. Sam looked over at Steve, pointing to the night vision goggles hanging around his neck, then to his flashlight. Steve bit his lip, and Sam knew that he was running over the same variables in his head as Sam was. On the one hand, if they proceeded without light, they would be able to maintain whatever element of surprise they retained. On the other, fighting in night vision goggles was a bitch. Aside from that, if no alarm had been raised over the course of them entering the property, exploring the house, and entering first the barn, then the tunnel, there was unlikely to be one coming; in all likelihood, the facility had been shut down. Finally, in the final dying glow of the flare, Steve held up his flashlight. Sam nodded his agreement, relieved that Steve had reached the same conclusion as him, sparing Sam the indignity of trying to conduct an argument through military hand signals.
They clicked on their flashlights just as the flare flickered for one final time. Steve dropped the spent stick on the ground as Sam pulled a bioluminescent marker from his pocket, another gift from Stark. He drew a large ‘x’ on the wall beneath the tunnel they’d entered through, the small bacteria within the marker’s ink instantly adhering to the wall and beginning to glow a faint, steady green. Capping the pen, he turned back to Steve, who was looking back and forth between the two branches of the hallway. Both branches appeared to be identical, continuing straight for several hundred meters before turning. Steve turned to look at Sam, who shrugged, then pointed left. Steve shrugged back at him, and they both turned left, walking down the hallway slowly. Years of training had both of them making almost no noise as they padded down the metal hallway.
The temperature in the facility was cool, especially compared to the heat outside, and Sam found himself shivering as he walked, sweat quickly drying on his skin. So far the facility wasn’t like any other Hydra base they’d found, not even the one at Three Sisters, and it was making Sam’s skin crawl. The few bases they’d found occupied had all been in cities, those discoveries usually a chaotic free-for-all as Sam, Steve, and sometimes Tasha would shut down the entire cell. Sam much preferred the abandoned ones they’d found, filled with dust and ancient computer modems. At least at the inactive ones he hadn’t been bitten while trying to pry a poison tooth out of one Hydra agent’s mouth while another shouted ‘hail Hydra’ over and over again while hitting him over the head with a keyboard. Seattle had been rough.
They had also found two bases that weren’t abandoned or occupied, but destroyed by someone else long before Sam and Steve had stumbled across them. All that was left of those bases had been twisted metal and ash. Steve had confessed to Sam, after the second one, that he kept hoping to find some sign of Barnes having been the one to destroy the bases. He’d sighed, looking up at the ceiling of their hotel room.
“I just want to know that he’s still out there,” he’d said, and Sam had twitched with a possibility he hadn’t even considered yet. He’d wondered then, and now, which would be worse – for Barnes to be still out there somewhere, a ghost in the wind, or for him to already be dead.
Abandoned, occupied, or destroyed, no base had revealed anything to them about Barnes’ past, or where he might be now. They had also largely looked like what they were – offices, labs, or armouries. The facility they were in now, however, had yet to given them any indication of what it might have been used for, and Sam found himself wondering if this was a Hydra base at all, or if they hadn’t stumbled into something else altogether. The hallway smelled strange, stale air mixing with the strong scent of metal. There was something else too, something just below that. Every time Sam thought he’d caught it, it would drift away, leaving him unable to identify what it was. At first he’d thought it was sweet, but the second time it had smelled more like something rotting. It never lasted long enough for him to figure it out.
“Do you smell something?” He finally asked Steve under his breath as they approached what Sam could now see was thankfully just a turn in the hallway, and not another branch. Sam glanced over just in time to catch Steve looking back at him, just for a moment.
“Yeah,” Steve said, frustration obvious in his voice as he returned his attention to the hallway before them. “I just can’t… I can’t quite figure out what it is. I can’t pin it down.” Sam nodded.
“It’s sweet?” he said. “Or rotting? Maybe?”
“Both?” Steve said hesitantly. “Like… like how the crates of fruit would smell by the docks in the summer.” Sam was stopped from replying to Steve as they arrived at the bend in the hallway. Sam gestured, Steve nodded, and Sam positioned himself against the wall, directly before the turn. He counted down in his head, three, two, one… and Steve threw himself across the hallway, hitting the wall on the other side, gun pointing down the hallway as Sam slid around the corner, gun raised to provide covering fire. After a long minute of scanning the hallway in front of them, they both cautiously relaxed from their tense stances. The hallway remained the same after the turn, empty, featureless, and pitch black. The amount of time spent seeing only with the beam of the flashlight was beginning to make Sam twitchy, his brain convinced that there was always something moving just outside of his field of vision. He knew the paranoia was natural for the circumstances, but it didn’t make it any less awful as he had to fight the urge to continuously jerk his flashlight around to his blind spots.
It was when they had travelled several meters down the new hallway that Sam noticed something appearing out of the darkness ahead of them.
“Steve?” He asked.
“Yeah, I see it,” Steve said, both of them pointing their flashlights at the floor for a moment to confirm that the faint light in front of them was indeed emitting from something else. As they slowly approached, the light coalesced into a rectangular shape, light leaking around the edges of a closed door. They glanced at each other, before Sam once again took the position of providing cover fire, since Steve was, as he often pointed out, far better able to survive being shot than Sam was. After a count of three, Steve burst through the door Sam swinging in after him, sweeping the room. Sam’s eyes scanned half the room before he stopped, frozen. They were standing in a white square of a room, steadily lit from above with glowing ceiling panels that left no room for shadows. In the centre, was a glass cube, and inside that, a little kid, hunched over and facing away from them.
“Fuck,” he heard Steve say, and Sam lowered his gun, stepping forward cautiously, gesturing for Steve to remain where he was. The smell that they’d been guessing at before was obvious here, thick and cloying. Steve had been right, it did smell like rotting fruit.
“Hey,” he said, making his voice soft. “Are you okay? My name’s Sam.” The boy twitched at the sound of Sam’s voice, and Sam took another cautious step forward. “What’s your name?” he asked, and the boy turned. Sam froze.
“My name’s Sam,” said the boy, who wore Sam’s face from when he was five years old, so familiar from the photos that lived on his Ma’s mantle. Sam’s eyes had never been pitch black though, and he fought the urge to shiver as a wave of cold dread washed over him, every instinct in his body telling him to run, to disappear, to escape the predator standing in front of him. And that was what it was, whatever it was. It sure wasn’t any little boy that blinked up at Sam from that glass cube. “What’s the matter?,” it said, and Sam took a stumbling step backwards. Suddenly Steve was at his elbow, touching his fingers lightly to Sam’s arm.
“Sam? What’s wrong?” he asked, and then glanced up and froze. Sam glanced back at the cage to see the thing that looked like a child smiling up at Steve.
“Wow wow wow,” it said. “Aren’t you just…” it paused, looking Steve up and down, licking it’s lips, and Sam’s skin crawled with instinctive revulsion. “Neat,” it finally finished, and Sam realized that he’d grabbed ahold of Steve’s arm at some point without even noticing.
“What are you?” Steve asked, and Sam had no idea how he found the ability to speak without his voice shaking.
“What kind of a question is that to ask a lady?,” the thing asked, taking a step to the side and suddenly it was a woman pacing around the perimeter of its glass cage, curly brown hair pinned up in a retro wave, red lips curving up in a smile that was just a hair too wide to be natural. She looked familiar, and after a moment Sam realized he was looking at Peggy Carter, one of the founders of SHIELD, from back when Steve would have first known her. A glance at Steve confirmed that the other man was staring, shellshocked, at the ghost from his past.
“What are you?” Sam repeated, finding it easier to speak now that he wasn’t looking at a nightmare version of his childhood self. The thing’s eyes flicked back to Sam, and it grinned impossibly wide.
“I am something you cannot comprehend, Samuel Wilson. Do not hurt yourself trying to.” Sam thought he was going to throw up, or maybe pass out, with how hard every instinct he had was telling him to run from the room.
“What are you doing here?” Steve asked. The thing turned back to him.
“Hydra thought they could control me.” It tilted its head. “Parents always think the can control their children, even though that’s never been true.”
“Could they?” he asked, and the thing laughed, a noise like metal tearing, like dry leaves rustling, like bones snapping. It raised its arms, perfectly manicured nails gesturing to the empty room around them.
“What do you think?” it asked.
“So they locked you up down here?” Sam asked. It looked at him, making a considering, humming noise that Sam could feel in his lungs.
“I miscalculated,” it said, and suddenly the room was covered in blood and gore, the walls dripping with it as the space echoed with the pained screams of humans being rended limb from limb. Sam stumbled back in shock, and then, just as suddenly, the room was white again. Before either of them had time to recover, the thing looked up at the ceiling, which bubbled and popped, human bones raining down. Sam raised his arms to protect his head, but the bones fell in a circle around him, hitting the ground and slowly sinking down into the floor like it was a particularly thick and viscous liquid and not solid steel. The final bone disappeared, and there was nothing but silence left in the room.
“You’re trapped,” Sam said, the realization striking him as he raised his head. The thing paced back and forth the length of it’s cage. “You killed them all, but you’re still trapped.” The thing snarled, taking a step towards Sam and suddenly it was Riley staring back at him, lip raised and twisted. Sam flinched back, only just managing to stop himself from actually taking a step backwards. As quickly as it had angered, it stood down, smiling at Sam and Steve.
“Perhaps,” it said, “but now you’re here, and you will free me.”
“Why would we do that?” Steve asked, at the same time that Sam spoke, “Like hell we will.” The thing’s smile widened, and then it was a grubby little boy, scabby knees and wild black hair.
“Steve,” it said. “Steve, I’m scared.” If Sam had thought Steve looked shocked before, it was nothing to how he looked now, face white as a sheet as he stared down at the boy. Sam glanced back at the boy and yeah, that was almost definitely Bucky Barnes as a kid and fuck but Sam didn’t want to deal with this, didn’t want this to be happening, didn’t want to have to watch the way Steve’s face crumpled as it continued to speak. “Why did you abandon me Steve? You left me all alone, and it was so so cold.”
“I’m sorry,” Steve said, almost by accident, like the words were being torn from his mouth against his will.
“They hurt me Stevie, hurt me so bad and for so long. I waited for you to rescue me, you know. Like I always rescued you.”
“I’m sorry,” Steve repeated, sounding shattered, and Sam couldn’t stand it, couldn’t stand this.
“It’s not real–” he started, but the thing in the cage spoke over him, not looking away from Steve who was staring back at him, caught in it’s gaze.
“You never came. You left me there to die. But they wouldn’t let me.” The thing started to cry, and Sam watched in horror as Steve stumbled forward a couple of helpless steps, hands held up in front of himself as if to ward off the things it was saying. “Why didn’t you rescue me Steve? Why did you let them hurt me? Why didn’t you free me?”
“Steve–” Sam wasn’t sure what he was going to say, didn’t know what he could possibly say to try and talk his friend down. He abruptly cut himself off, though, when he noticed what exactly Steve was walking towards – a barely visible touchpad, glowing slightly against the rest of the glass of the cage.
“Fuck!” He swore, jerking forward on legs that had gone half numb with adrenaline. He stumbled, but still managed to shove into Steve’s shoulder. Steve, completely focused on the boy in the cage, was taken totally by surprise by the unexpected force of Sam shoving into him from the side. Reacting instinctively, Steve pushed Sam away from him as he stepped back into a fighting stance. Sam registered the feeling of his back hitting the glass and the hiss of a seal opening at almost the exact same time, in just enough time to spin and see as the door of the cage slid back its final few inches. The thing looked out through the open door in surprise, as if it had never expected that they would actually release it.
“You have freed me Sam Wilson,” it said, still looking out the door towards its freedom rather than at either of the men in the room. Between one blink and the next it became Sam’s sister, exactly as she’d looked the last time he’d seen her, eleven months ago, and Sam felt a deep swell of terror reaching up to crush his ribs. “And so I will give you the key to Winter’s salvation.” Sam blinked, thrown, and it turned to look at him, before moving to close the distance between them almost faster than Sam could track. It stopped, inches from his face, and Sam’s eyes widened in surprise as the thing grinned, showing far more teeth than could ever possibly fit in a human mouth. Sam could see himself reflected in its liquid black eyes as it leaned forward, placing its head next to Sam’s.
“Remember,” a hot breath ghosted across Sam’s ear and he was paralyzed, every instinct in his body screaming at him to run as he fought to even twitch a finger. “Zhelaniye. Rzhavyy. Semnadtsat’. Rassvet. Pech. Devyat’. Dobroserdechnyy. Vozvrashcheniye na rodinu. Odin. Gruzovoy vagon.” And then it was gone, disappearing out into the hallway with barely a whisper of sound to mark its departure.
Sam sagged, and Steve let out a choked gasp, dropping to his knees.
“Fuck,” Steve said with feeling, and Sam nodded his agreement. Steve leaned back on his heels, wiping sweaty hair away from his face with a hand that Sam could see was trembling from half the room away.
“I fucking hate Hydra,” Sam said, following Steve’s example and sitting down before he fell down. “Fucking Nazi bastards.”
“What the fuck,” Steve started, but he didn’t seem to know how to finish that sentence, how to encapsulate everything that had just happened, so he ended up just gesturing slightly helplessly before letting his hands fall back to his lap.
“I don’t even know man.”
“What was that?” Steve asked. Sam didn’t think that particularly deserved an answer as he leaned against the wall of the now-empty glass cube and waited for the world to start making a little bit of sense again. It was several long minutes before either of them felt capable of movement again, but eventually Steve pushed himself to his feet and Sam, groaning, followed suit. They headed over to the door, redrawing their guns as they reached the exit back into the hallway. Both men hesitated, however, once they reached the entryway.
“Do we still have to clear the rest of the facility?” Steve asked, and Sam snorted as if he hadn’t been thinking the exact same thing. “Yeah,” Steve said, voice wry, “I guess we do.” They exited the room, Sam closing the door behind them and marking the wall next to it with the bioluminescent pen. They continued down the hallway, both returning to their previous positions, guns and flashlights drawn as the warm glow of the room quickly faded behind them and the pitch-black emptiness of the hallway swallowed them up.
They hadn’t walked far before they found another door. This one had no lights emitting from it, and Sam thought that if they were less on edge, they might have missed it, as the edges of the door blended almost exactly with the surrounding steel. Still, they did pick it out, and, after several expressive hand gestures, Steve took point as they pushed the door open and entered the space beyond it.
Like the hallway, and unlike the room with the cage, this room was not lit, except for a large, lightly glowing rectangle along one wall. Sam ignored it until they had successfully cleared the room. Letting his curiosity take hold of him, he took a couple of steps closer to the wall. It took a moment before he suddenly realized what he was looking at – a one-way mirror opening out into the room with the cage.
“This is for observation,” Sam said, surprised. “They were observing this thing. Why? To make sure if didn’t get too powerful?”
“I don’t know,” Steve said, his voice accompanied by the rustling of paper and Sam turned to see him flipping through some of the papers scattered across the handful of desks that were spread across the room in a haphazard approximation of rows. In the beam of his flashlight, Sam was able to see as Steve bent over, squinting and poking at one of the computers. “How the fuck do you turn this on?” he asked, and Sam knew he was probably just playing up his technical ineptitude to make Sam relax a bit, but damn if it didn’t work. Sam laughed quietly as he crossed the room.
“Move aside grandpa,” he said, hip-checking Steve, who went easily, and yeah, there was the smile that said he thought he was getting away with something. Unlike other people (Tony) Sam knew that Steve was actually really good at picking up unfamiliar technologies. Sam wasn’t sure if Steve realized that Sam knew he was faking it or not, but either way, the old man jokes were always funny.
Sam found the power button easily enough, and he was slightly surprised when he pushed it and the computer wheezed to life. He frowned down at it as the screen began to glow and the startup screen appeared.
“Huh,” Steve said, and Sam nodded.
“I wasn’t sure that would work,” he said. “I mean, that one room has light but… why isn’t anything else on?” Sam felt more than saw Steve shrug. It wasn’t long before the computer was finished starting up. The password screen popped up, and Sam sighed, slumping slightly in his seat. He stared at the glowing blue screen for a long moment before his eyes drifted down to a faded yellow post-it stuck to the bottom of the monitor.
“Jesus,” he said, picking it up and sticking it next to the keyboard. Typing the string of numbers and letters into the box on the screen, Sam couldn’t help but roll his eyes when the computer chimed as it accepted the password. Massive secret evil Nazi organization, defeated by a lazy office worker.
When the screen finally resolved itself into a desktop complete with a background of rolling green fields, Sam began clicking around the computer’s files. Steve left him to it, going back to flipping through the paper files, flashlight held in his teeth in a way that made Sam feel a bit nauseous in sympathy (could supersoldier teeth still break? Would they heal?). The files contained a lot of the usual Hydra garbage, familiar enough to Sam at this point that he was able to easily scan through the files. He was always so thankful he no longer needed to read every file to determine if there was something useful within them. Both men worked in silence for several long minutes, quickly scanning through the information stored in this particular facility. It was as he was nearing the last of the files that Sam found something that made him pause.
“Project M,” he said aloud, and Steve snorted without looking up from his files.
“They just get more and more creative,” he said dryly, and Sam smiled as he double clicked on the file. He began lightly scanning the page then stopped, frowning and scrolling back up before beginning again, reading far more closely.
“Huh,” he heard Steve say, but he was far too focused on what he was reading to pay attention to the other man, at least until Steve began reading aloud..
“Project M,” he said, “was created in response to the incident at the White House in 1973, and the revelation of the powers possessed by the mutant known as Mystique. The project remained entirely theoretical until 2004, when Hydra managed to acquire subjects 1A, 1B, and 1C. The project had moderate success with subject 1C, who was testing positively prior to it’s self-termination at sixteen months (see Appendix D for the complete reports on 1C). Subjects 1A and 1B were ultimately categorized as failures (see Appendix B for the complete reports on 1A’s complete biological deterioration, and Appendix C for the complete reports on the decision to terminate subject 1B).” Steve paused, taking a deep breath.
“Steve,” Sam started, because he could go the rest of his life without having to read or hear any more detailed reports on human testing and it wouldn’t be long enough. Whether or not Steve heard him, he didn’t speak again right away, silently scanning the pages. Sam glanced back to the computer screen. He had a different report open than the one that Steve was reading from, but it was obviously from the same project. He read a couple of lines almost without meaning to before swallowing harshly.
“Steve,” he said again, clearing his throat, and this time the other man looked up at him, something dark and angry and sorrowful in his eyes. Sam looked back at his screen. “Subject 2A has demonstrated significant positive improvements since its acquisition in 2011,” he read aloud, glancing back at Steve to see the other man now completely focused on him. “The surgical trials conducted through the months of September, October, and November of 2012 produced a significant improvement in the subject’s telepathic abilities, enabling it to project vivid hallucinations into other’s minds. Despite an attempt to self-terminate in December of 2012, the subject is largely compliant, and responds well to disciplinary measures.”
“Don’t,” Steve said, and Sam didn’t bother to look up. He didn’t need to see what was written on the other man’s face.
“It was a mutant,” he said, voice flat. Steve’s hand coming down on his shoulder made him flinch, but he still leaned into the solid, warm weight of the other man, anchoring him.
“They just… abandoned this place,” Steve said, and Sam glanced up to see him staring towards the one-way mirror. He looked back down at the computer, the logs that he’d read when he first opened it suddenly provoking an intense wave of nausea and anger.
“They shut down the project after Insight fell,” Sam said. “It’s in the logs. The scientists couldn’t bring… them with them, so they just left on the biological monitoring systems so Hydra could at least record the data of how long they took to die.”
“Fuck,” Steve said with feeling, and Sam let himself slump into solid press of Steve’s hip against his shoulder for a moment, before he stood up.
“You need to check anymore files?” he asked Steve, an intense feeling of relief sweeping through him when the other man shook his head. “Great,” he said. “Let’s finish clearing this facility so we can burn this motherfucker down.”
It turned out that there wasn’t much more to clear - the facility seemed to be dedicated solely to Project M. There was something horrifically mundane about clearing a locker room, bathrooms, and a cafeteria, along with a handful of other offices. The reminder that the people who worked at the facility, that worked for Hydra, were people with lives and presumably human emotions but who still chose to work for Hydra wasn’t one that Sam ever enjoyed. The surgery was still the worst part of the facility however, though it was as clean and pristine as if it had never been used. The sight of the clean instruments, scalpels and saws and long metal rods, laid out in neat rows, made Sam feel as though at any minute a Hydra scientist might walk through the door and pick right up where they had left off. Still, as they rounded a corner and caught sight of a faint beam of light, a glowing ‘x’ on the wall beneath it, Sam was just grateful they hadn’t found any other test subjects.
He was feeling a bit frantic as he climbed the last few meters out of the tunnel, the claustrophobically small space made near unbearable by everything that they’d seen underground. When he stepped out he immediately stumbled over to the entrance of the barn, distantly aware of the sounds of Steve exiting the tunnel behind him as he closed his eyes against the wind. They had been underground long enough that the sun was fading, but even its setting beams felt like a balm on Sam’s soul, and something small and knotted unfurled slightly within him as he stood there, swaying slightly and listening to the chirp of insects in the field. He finally opened his eyes when he felt Steve stand next to him, feeling belatedly relieved to see that their truck was still parked in front of the house, and the mutant hadn’t stolen it.
“I think we’re going to have to call Tash,” Steve said. “We don’t have any explosives with us that’ll be able to deal with the fact that most of what’s down there is steel and concrete.” Sam nodded.
“Nick will probably send his team he thinks we don’t know about,” he said, and Steve laughed a bit, shaky but still there.
“Probably,” he said, nudging Sam’s shoulder. “C’mon,” he said, and Sam sighed but turned to follow him back into the darkness of the barn, picking up the few pieces of equipment they’d left lying around on the barn floor as he watched Steve place the door back over the black hole in the floor. Grabbing the edges, he squeezed, and Sam winced at the familiar scream of bending metal as Steve forced the door to close.
“Well that should hold it until someone else gets here,” Sam said dryly as Steve stood back up, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand.
“Yeah,” Steve said with a smile. Sam handed him back his flashlight.
“C’mon,” he said. “I really, really fucking need a beer.” Steve laughed, and followed him back outside. As they pulled back out onto the highway, leaving the barn and house and that godforsaken facility behind them, his thoughts returned to the mutant they’d freed, however inadvertently. He hoped that whatever Hydra had done to them, that they were able to recover and make a life for themselves. He felt a brief twinge of guilt that they hadn’t done more to help them, even though he knew that there wasn’t anything that they could have done. The last words they’d spoken came floating back into Sam’s head.
He couldn’t remember what they had said, exactly, but he was pretty sure it’d been Russian.