Old Familiar

by Katjatier

Summary:

Post CA:TWS, Rumlow finds Bucky before he can fully get his memories back.

Do not expect anything of redeeming value from this piece of fanfiction. It's just going to be garbage.

Chapter 1

Rumlow catches up with him outdoors, in a trash-strewn patch of woods near a railroad line. The soldier has obtained clothes from somewhere, and shoes, and a bag, and possibly he was planning on going somewhere on one of the trains that roll past regularly at onboardable speeds, but now he is slumped under a tree with his bag next to him. He smells like vomit. There are pieces of dead leaves caught in his hair.

He’s focused, though, staring up at Rumlow from the ground. His eyes narrow in a way that seems to show recognition, but he makes no attempt to move.

Rumlow would like to get down to his level and get in his personal space, but the movement would be too painful on his not-quite-healed wounds and his fucked-up scars, so he just stands over him, boots crunching on the cold ground. “You gotta learn to do better, buddy,” he says.

The soldier stares up at him, steadily. His human hand is shaking, and he covers it with his left, gloved one as if that can hide it. Does he recognize Rumlow? The soldier is good with faces, despite the obvious memory problems, but on the other hand Rumlow is half-covered in gauze bandages that haven’t been changed since he quit the hospital, and hasn’t had time to wash properly since he started tracking the soldier, and probably looks like he stumbled out of an old shitty movie about explorers and curses and mummies.

That part is not so bad, actually. He likes the idea of being a curse.

“If you’d let me get to you sooner, this wouldn’t have happened,” he says, half to himself, because he isn’t sure the soldier is really listening. The words are a lie, anyway. The slow-release drugs the scientists put in the soldier’s arm are clearly wearing off—it’s happened before, on missions that lasted longer than expected, and then as now Rumlow cannot do shit about it. He isn’t even sure what exactly the drugs are—just that they probably contain a lot of painkillers, because Hydra was always far more inclined to dose the soldier up than to try to fix any of his physical problems or give him time to heal properly.

And Rumlow couldn’t have helped the soldier with that even if he did have any painkillers to spare. If he had any painkillers to spare he would already have taken them himself.

The soldier looks up at him. It’s already starting to get dark, and the air is cold and the ground must be colder, but his face is wet with sweat. He looks angry, but more than that he just looks miserable. Rumlow had expected more of a reaction, considering how long he'd spent running. This is not bad, though.

“Stand up,” Rumlow says, and if the soldier hadn’t obeyed, Rumlow probably just would have shot him right there, and maybe himself as well, because scary appearance aside, Rumlow is fucked if he doesn’t get help, and his immediate future survival relies on this idiot’s obedience.

The soldier stands, though. It takes him a second or two to get himself together enough to do it, and he looks like he has no idea why he’s doing it, but he pulls himself to his feet and stands, looking only a little unsteady.

God, he smells bad.

“You know who I am?” Rumlow says.

“Commander,” the soldier says and looks confused again. Then the expression changes to something close to relief, face softening like he is happy about the memory.

That’s a trip. Most people don’t look relieved when they remember Rumlow. Then again, their relationship had always been kind of special.

“You’re coming with me,” Rumlow says firmly.

The soldier simply looks at him, looking sullen and rather stuck-up for someone who smells like they have forgotten showering exists. He doesn’t move, unless you count the slight swaying he is doing on his feet. Apparently he’s happy to sit out here in the cold and throw up on himself until he freezes or starves or wanders onto a train track.

And it’s not like Rumlow can drag him. Can’t physically do anything unless the soldier lets him. Rumlow is tired and sore, but he still has it together enough to know he needs to change tactics.

He softens his tone in turn, steps closer. “I was always nice to you. Wasn’t I. You remember that part, yeah.”

No answer. The woods around them are quiet, just wind and the very faint sound of traffic from far away. A fast-food wrapper is caught in a bare branch not far from the soldier’s head, shuddering in the breeze. 

It’s true, as well. Rumlow had always been extraordinarily nice.

“You remember a lot of stuff, don’t you,” he goes on. “You remember a little bit about everything, and you’ve been trying to work things out. Figure out good and evil and all that shit, after it’s all been messed up in your head for so long.”

The soldier doesn’t answer, just stares. Rumlow is close enough now to smell the old sweat and the vomit and the strange chemical smell that might be coming from his arm or from his skin. He reaches out to touch him, and the soldier flinches.

Rumlow keeps the flicker of annoyance off his face. Reaching his arm up like that had hurt, and that’s how he reacts?

Still, he forces a little smile onto his face. “I’m gonna help you out with part of what you’re trying to learn,” he says. “Lesson one: If someone’s nice to you, you do nice things in return.”

“You were Hydra,” the soldier says, almost cutting him off, like he’s just remembered it and needs to tell him immediately.

Rumlow shrugs, despite the pain it causes. “So were you.”

That’s enough, apparently, to short-circuit him. The soldier stares at him blankly. Finally he gives an almost-imperceptible nod.

“You’re going to help me,” Rumlow says, firm again now.

The soldier looks confused, like the moment of clarity has already dissipated. But then an odd expression of relief appears again. Maybe in this state, an order is actually a comfort.

“I have transport,” Rumlow says, and the soldier is already relaxing a little, body language changing like he's prepared to follow. “You don’t actually have to do much at all.”

This is, obviously, another lie.

 

 

Chapter 2

The soldier folds his body down into the passenger seat like it’s his last act before dying. He drops his bag down at his feet and then curls forward a little, one hand pressed against his stomach through the filthy jacket he’s wearing. Rumlow shoves the soldier’s leg out of the way of the car door and goes to close it, and then sees that the other man is looking up at him, his gaze still weirdly sharp and focussed.

“I am not going to kill anyone,” the soldier says.

It is the longest string of words Rumlow has heard him put together so far. And it’s a good sign: Rumlow needs to use the soldier for their first task as quickly as possible, just in case he starts to deteriorate further. If the soldier collapses or gets completely incoherent before they’re in a good stable environment, they’re both fucked. He holds Rumlow’s gaze, as well, skin washed-out and filthy under the car’s interior light, but his face still hard and determined. He clearly expects Rumlow to argue, or worse.

Instead, Rumlow just nods, and closes the car door.

He takes his time walking around the to other side of the car to get in the driver seat. Not that he could go that fast even if he wanted to, in his current physical condition, but still. He opens the driver door, sits down leisurely, takes his time retrieving the key fob and turning on the engine.

The inside of the vehicle had gotten cold while he’d been away, and he turns up the heating a bit, taking his time adjusting the dials on the panel. The soldier’s eyes are still on him. Out of the corner of his eye he can see he still has one hand pressed against his stomach, like he’s cut there and trying to stop the bleeding. Can feel the confusion, the tension stretching.

“I didn’t say I wanted you to kill anyone,” Rumlow says finally. “Now put your seatbelt on. The car will beep at me if you don’t.”

That part is true. It’s a nice car: the guy he killed for it had been decently rich. An automatic, yes, but Rumlow is too fucked up to drive a manual right now. It hurts enough just to put on his own seatbelt.

The soldier doesn’t move. “I don’t want…” He stops, draws in a breath that sounds like it is painful. The new vibration of the engine seems to somehow be enough to hurt him. “I don’t want to hurt anyone, either.”

“Seatbelt,” Rumlow says.

The soldier frowns, and looks like he is going to cry. Sitting with him in the passenger seat puts the soldier’s left arm closer to him, but Rumlow still risks it: he reaches over, squeezes him above the knee, as hard as he can with his bad hand. The soldier’s skin is still warm through the thin fabric of the filthy jeans he is wearing, despite the cold outside.

The soldier looks down at his leg, then up at him again, so slow it’s almost comical.

Rumlow eases his grip, pats him above the knee, encouraging. “Don’t fret. We are on our way to do good right now, soldier.”

He looks stupidly confused, but after a second he reaches up to grab the seatbelt. Rumlow lets go of his leg, and smiles. He shifts into drive, pulls the car out onto the dark road.

The soldier doesn’t ask for clarification after that, just sits, his hand still pushed against his stomach. Maybe he has remembered how little good asking questions ever did. Maybe he has just forgotten his train of thought. Whichever it is, he is quiet, and that’s fine.

It’s a long drive, and after a few miles it starts to snow. The soldier leans back a little, rests his head back against the nice leather headrest, and not long after that his breathing slows and evens out.

He’s not actually asleep, of course, but it’s a reasonable facade, and the fact that he’s got it together enough to pretend to do anything is another good sign. Maybe there will be no collapse. Maybe Rumlow caught him when he was already at the worst of it.

It’s close to midnight when he pulls the car off onto the side of a small, two-lane road. The middle of fucking nowhere, but the moon is out, and with the snow on the ground it’s way too bright out and less than ideal for what they’re doing. But it’s not like he can sit back and wait for better conditions, so he cuts the engine on the dead man’s car. “Wake up time, soldier,” he says. “We’re gonna break into a house.”

The soldier opens his eyes immediately, apparently forgetting that he’s supposed to have been in a deep sleep. He stares at Rumlow for a long moment, then out the window at the line of dark trees by the side of the road, then back. His voice is quiet and croaky when he says: “You needed me so you can break into a house?”

“This isn’t just a house, buddy. The rich asshole that lives down the road from here is William Rayner.”

The soldier frowns. Obviously he has no fucking clue what Rumlow is talking about.

“You know, the doctor? Big Hydra guy, you met him a few times? He managed to cover his own ass pretty good after the shit went down, so he’s still free. Been hiding out here a while, though. Scared.”

The soldier stares at him blankly. Now that the car is stopped and there isn’t much air moving around, Rumlow is really starting to notice the smell again.

“Whatever,” he says. “Move. Come help me gear up. You still know the codes, don’t you? If he tries to call someone?”

No answer, just more staring. He only seems to be able to manage a few sentences in a row before his brain has to stop and boot up again.

But he can walk, at least, and he manages to follow Rumlow into the woods surrounding the property without forgetting where he is or tripping over or something equally as dumb, so it’s good.

“He’s in there alone,” Rumlow says when the trees start to thin out at the perimeter of the property. He'd said all this before, at the car, but it can't hurt to repeat it. “We are gonna get in there and you are gonna incapacitate him, not kill him, all right? And no brain damage. We need this guy.”

The soldier looks at him. The moonlight on his skin makes him look about as healthy as a drowned corpse, and if it weren't for the fact that Rumlow can see his breath he might have thought the soldier had lost it so much that he'd forgotten to breathe. As Rumlow watches, he nods and tries to stand up straighter, but then sways slightly, his elbow brushing a nearby branch so that snow patters to the ground.

For a moment, his confidence wavers. There is a good chance they will both die here, brains splattered all over some douchebag doctor’s carpet because they are both so off their game and because Rumlow is an idiot. But he doesn’t have a choice, so he keeps going.

Ten minutes later, he feels dumb for even worrying.

 

 

The soldier disables the one alarm that goes off, gets through the house’s admittedly-quite-sturdy defenses with what looks like ease. Rumlow had really overestimated how sick the soldier was, because he only looks a little bit pale, has barely worked up a sweat by the time he rips the metal door off of the doctor’s useless panic room and lunges inside, knocking the phone the old man is fumbling with out of his hands.

The look on stupid Reyner’s face is enough to put Rumlow in his best mood in weeks—it’s pure, childish terror; the expression of a man suddenly face-to-face with a blank-eyed, barely-human assassin who now also looks and smells like a hobo.

The soldier does not notice the man’s terror, does not slow: he yanks the doctor close, restrains him with his metal arm around his neck. Swings him around so that they are both facing Rumlow: the doctor’s face is red below his neat grey hair, flushed with terror and lack of oxygen. The soldier, behind him, looks tired and angry and almost bored.

“God,” Reyner chokes, eyes on Rumlow and so wide it’s like they’re popping out of his head. “God, please don’t let him—”

Rumlow steps forward. The stun baton he had stolen from a different dead ex-coworker is clipped to his belt, next to the pocket where he’s keeping the cable ties, and although it’s not the modified Hydra type that can take down someone like the soldier, it’s enough to do this particular job. Rumlow flicks it on, smiles, and taps the end of it against the man’s forehead.

The doctor slumps, going loose in the soldier’s grip without even a scream. Man, this shit never gets old.

“Tie him up and double check he didn’t call anybody,” Rumlow says. He drops the cable-ties on the carpeted floor near the soldier’s feet. “I’ll do a quick sweep and then we’ll set him up somewhere and have a talk.”

The soldier nods, and lets go of the doctor, who slumps to the floor with a loud thud.

“Jesus, be careful. I said no brain damage.”

He doesn’t answer, and Rumlow kicks the cable ties closer and then turns away.

 

 

The place is big, stupid-useless big, because apparently being a crooked Hydra doctor pays well even if you don’t do it often enough to get caught. As he’d thought, there is no one else inside; no sign of anyone, either. The main living areas of the house are a mess, too, which he figures is good—it means that this guy has been hanging out here alone with no one coming to clean up for him. People like Reyner, he knows, always need someone else to clean up for them.

And all of that means privacy, which is one thing that the three of them will definitely need in the coming days.

Once he’s done checking the house, Rumlow goes back and looks through the cabinets in the bathrooms—the master, the guest rooms, the one in the furnished basement. He takes his time, appreciating the warmth of the house on his cold skin even if he hasn’t found what he is looking for yet, and then in a little cabinet next to the microwave in the trash-cluttered kitchen he finds it, finally: a vial of hydrocodone next to the half-empty Tylenol. A personal supply, not a crooked doctor’s supply, but it’ll do for now. He takes two pills with water from the sink, drinks more water out of the least-dirty glass he can find. The tiled kitchen floor is filthy and gritty under the soles of his boots.

He puts the glass down on a rare empty spot on the counter, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, exhales. This is—good, all things considered. This is going well.

He makes his way, slowly, through several long corridors and back to the busted-open panic room.

“All clear,” he says as he steps past the mangled door. “Let’s—”

Rumlow stops.

The doctor is on the floor, still unconscious, ankles bound and arms secure behind his back with the cable ties—that part is what he expected. But the soldier is not standing up guarding him, or even sitting nearby. He’s slumped back against a wall several feet away, head resting on his knees. He does not look up when Rumlow steps closer.

“Hey,” Rumlow says. What the hell? The soldier had been doing fine. Is he just tired?

He steps closer, avoiding the bound middle-aged man slumped on the floor, and nudges the soldier’s filthy boot with the toe of his own, lightly at first, then harder. The soldier twitches.

“I tied him up and I checked,” he mumbles against his knees.

“That’s nice,” Rumlow says. “Now get the fuck up, we are not done.”

The soldier doesn’t move, except for his head pressing forward a little more into the fabric. His human hand looks like it’s shaking slightly. “I tied him up and I checked,” he says again. He says the words like he barely remembers what they mean.

Fuck, Rumlow thinks.

With some difficulty, he lowers himself down onto the carpet next to the soldier, and then lifts his head up from his knees to get a closer look. The soldier’s skin is flushed and wet, and strands of dirty hair are sticking to his skin with the sweat. His eyes are closed.

“Soldier,” he says, and taps the wet skin of his cheek gently with the palm of his good hand. “Soldier, report.”

The soldier opens his eyes, makes an effort to look up at him. He doesn’t seem to be able to focus his eyes.

Rumlow had not overestimated how sick he was, after all. He’d just underestimated the soldier’s unerring ability to put his mission before physical catastrophe.

He takes a deep breath, resists the urge to swear. They’d been doing so well, and if the soldier had just been able to hold out for even a few more hours before he decided to—

But that doesn’t matter now. The doctor is still unconscious anyway. Rumlow can get him somewhere more secure, away from any of the communication equipment in this room, and then he can focus on making sure the soldier doesn’t up and die on him. It’s a hiccup. As long as the soldier survives, it’s just a hiccup.

The bathroom in the basement is the furthest place from the front door that’s easy to clean. Getting the man down the stairs is a bitch, but manages to drag him across the fancy carpet, and then across the tiles of the nice bathroom floor. He fixes him to a pipe next to the toilet with another cable tie, tests it for strength, and checks the man’s pulse. Steady, although he is still out cold. Those batons work really fucking well, even the weak versions.

“Wait there,” he says to the unconscious man. “I won’t be long.”

This turns out to be optimistic.

 

 

“I am going to throw up,” the soldier says, softly, when Rumlow gets back to the busted-up panic room.

“Well, get out of this room first.”

The soldier doesn’t move. He’s still sitting with his head resting on his knees, filthy hair falling forward and blocking any view of his face.

“I’m not gonna fucking carry you.”

Nothing.

It’s tempting, very tempting, just to leave him here. Rumlow is tired, fucking tired, with a new edge of drowsiness from the pills, and the soldier will probably survive here alone, more or less.

But that isn’t how he’s gotten this far. He has been nice, like he’d said back when he’d found him. And now the soldier has collapsed like an overworked pack animal, and it’s because he had pushed himself too much. Rumlow had seen him push himself before, of course—that was the soldier’s job—but this time the soldier had done it just for him, even though Rumlow hadn’t even been sure the soldier recognized him.

Clearly, he had underestimated a lot of things.

Rumlow sighs, nudges the soldier's boot where it's pressed against the fancy thick carpet. “Okay,” he says. “You’re fucking lucky I’m so nice.”

The soldier doesn’t respond.

Rumlow drags him. Under the shoulders, losing his grip once or twice with his bad hand, and hitting a few important body parts on the way, but he does it: out of the panic room, past the smashed-up door, down the carpeted hallway, through the nearest bedroom—an unused guest room, he assumes, because it isn’t filthy—and into the attached bathroom.

“You get a bathroom as well,” he says. “Everyone gets a bathroom.”

This one is even nicer than the one in the basement: bright and shiny and bigger than a bedroom in an average house would be. This would usually be impressive, Rumlow supposes, but now it just means he has to drag the soldier further, and this means that they don’t quite make it.

Halfway across the too-big bathroom floor, the soldier suddenly moves, yanking himself out of Rumlow’s grasp, and Rumlow barely has time to step back before the soldier leans forward and vomits all over those nice shiny tiles. Then he collapses onto the floor, right on top of the mess he’d just made, because until now everything wasn’t disgusting enough.

“Jesus Christ,” Rumlow says.

But he is being nice, and he has dealt with worse, so he just grabs him by his left arm and resumes dragging him the few final feet to the shower, pulling open the glass door and dumping him inside. The soldier slumps down on his side in the stall, arms wrapped around his stomach, a disgusting, vomit-smeared mess.

He steps away from him, easing his way around the mess on the floor. There are no towels in the bathroom—maybe the good doctor had poached them from his guest rooms, being too good to do his own laundry—but the rack that formerly contained them still has a few washcloths, and he grabs those, turns back to the man he’d just dumped in the stall.

The soldier might have recognized him before, but he doesn’t seem to now. He looks sick and empty, more confused than he had been in the car, and it’s enough to make unease curl in Rumlow’s stomach.

He pushes the thought away, and steps into the stall as well. The soldier doesn’t move, just lies there still, his hand still shaking slightly, until Rumlow turns on the water.

The drugs must be making him dopey, or maybe it’s just old habit, but he’d forgotten that the water would be cold, and the soldier is, unfortunately, directly under the spray. He shudders, curls up violently, left arm wrapped around his legs like he is protecting himself. Rumlow steps back a little out of habit, his back brushing against the tiles.

Just stepping back would have been useless, of course, if the soldier had decided to do anything, but in any case it turns out to be unnecessary. The soldier might be confused, but he does not lash out, does not even try.

“Sorry,” Rumlow says down to him over the sound of the water. “It’ll warm up.” And then he just watches, carefully. The soldier is still curled up, but he’s made no automatic show of defense, not even a little.

The water warms, turns pleasant, and Rumlow carefully adjusts it to something comfortable. There’s a new bar of soap on the holder, and grabs it and eases himself down onto the floor, letting the spray hit him on the back through his clothes, wetting his hair.

The soldier looks up at him, eyes wide on his dripping face, and clearly he has no clue where either of them are. But he still doesn’t move.

Rumlow smiles. “I got burned into you pretty deep, didn’t I,”

The soldier doesn’t reply. He doesn’t even flinch when Rumlow touches his hair.

And he stays like that, too. He lets Rumlow take off his clothes, which isn’t a pleasant experience, but at least is a relatively easy one. Underneath all the unwashed layers, the soldier looks surprisingly healthy: he’s lost weight, but not that much. The skin around his metal arm looks sore and inflamed, but apart from that there’s no signs of whatever injuries he must have sustained while fucking up his last mission. Maybe he hadn’t actually received any injuries; maybe he had just decided to fuck off. That’s something for Rumlow to find out later, though.

Washing him is not a pleasant experience either. The soap has some flowery smell that reminds him of a grandma, and mixed with the other smells it’s plain disgusting. He shoves the used washcloths into the corner of the shower with the pile of the soldier’s clothing, uses the detachable showerhead to rinse most of the vomit on the floor down the drain. The soldier is compliant, at least, moving into whatever position Rumlow guides him into. He almost seems comfortable, all slack and acquiescent and trusting so that Rumlow almost feels dumb for worrying about being murdered by that metal arm five minutes ago.

The big room fills up with steam, and the water eventually runs clear, and the soldier smells like old-lady perfume instead of a homeless camp.

“Okay,” Rumlow says. He stands up, slow, and turns off the water. His own clothes have gotten wet as well, the gauze wet and clumpy and sticking to him uncomfortably. In front of him, the soldier curls up a little now that the warmth has gone.

“Stay there,” he says, and goes looking for something to use as a towel, because he hadn’t planned that far ahead.

He briefly considers and then decides against stripping the covers off the bed in the bedroom, and then finally finds a folded-up blanket on a shelf in the closet. The blanket smells like flowers, like someone had put fancy shit in the cupboard as well. This doctor either has a decorator or a dead ex-wife, or he is into some seriously gay shit.

The shower water has cooled unpleasantly on his skin when he steps back into the bright bathroom. He moves around the shallow puddle of water still collecting around the drain in the floor, gets closer to the open shower stall, and sees—

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” he says. “Really?”

The soldier doesn’t respond: he is still curled up on the floor of the shower. He doesn’t even have the decency to look ashamed of himself.

“I just washed you.”

No response: the room is silent except for the quiet plinking sounds of water dripping from the still-hanging showerhead.

Rumlow swears and throws the blanket he’s holding aside.

He spends the next five minutes cleaning his supposed subordinate up like he is a goddamn baby. Because he is being so nice, and because he needs him.

“You are gonna make this up for me later,” he says quietly, and of course the soldier just lies there like an idiot and doesn’t seem to even hear. “You have no fucking idea how much.”

 

 

 

Chapter 3

Rumlow is waiting in the soldier’s cell.

It isn’t that different from the cells he has seen for holding other Hydra prisoners. The door is reinforced, and there’s an electronic lock on the outside with bolts as thick as his arm, but Rumlow has never actually seen those bolts engaged, or any other extra security measures in force. It’s above his pay grade to ask why. There’s a shower area in one corner, too, which is another unusual thing, although Rumlow has way more of an idea why that is there. But apart from that, it’s all boring: bed, toilet, ceiling, walls, floor. Bright, cheap lights overhead that feel like they’ll give him a headache if he stays in here too long.

The cell is empty right now, except for Rumlow himself, who sits on the edge of the bed and waits, absently rubbing at the sore muscles in his neck. He’s tired tonight, and in a bad mood: it had been a bitch of a mission.

And apparently everyone else is in a bad mood tonight as well, given how long they’re taking with the soldier.

It’s a while before the unlocked door is hauled open, and two men shuffle in, dragging the soldier between them. A man on the soldier’s left who barely has his gun secured properly, another on his right who looks like he’s never touched a gun in his life, and who is carrying a clipboard under one arm.

Rumlow stands up, glares at them both. He barely glances at the soldier: he’s seen him enough times in this condition that he doesn’t have to.

The man without the gun dislodges the soldier’s arm from around his shoulder and steps forward, leaving the other guy trying and failing to prop up the whole of the soldier’s weight behind him. He holds his clipboard out to Rumlow. “Sign here,” he says.

Rumlow signs.

The man lifts the top sheet of paper from the clipboard, tears off another sheet of carbonless copy paper underneath it, and hands it to him. “Here’s your copy of the transfer form.”

“What the fuck am I supposed to do with this?”

“Secretary says he wants everything in hard copy, ever since—”

“Okay, whatever. Get lost already.”

The man backs up, shoving his stupid clipboard back under his arm. Rumlow folds up the sheet of copy paper like he’s breaking its spine, stuffs it in his pocket. Clipboard guy nods at the other man, who lets go of the soldier with visible eagerness and turns towards the door. The soldier slides to the ground, hitting the concrete floor with a loud thud. A moment later, the heavy door closes behind the two men.

Rumlow straightens up, cracking his sore neck, and sighs. Paper copies, he thinks. Of all the fucking things.

The room is silent except for the soldier’s rough breathing on the floor in front of him. His hair is wet, hanging over his face, clumped together with blood. He hadn’t caught himself before he fell, which is not a good sign.

Rumlow takes a breath to say something, but the soldier is already pulling himself up to his feet. That’s another bad sign, actually: Rumlow has never ordered the soldier to stand to attention before on any of the other times they’ve met in this room. Making himself stand up automatically probably means that the soldier has no idea who Rumlow is.

Rumlow takes a small step forward, grabbing the soldier's chin and tilting his head down a little to get a good look at him. The top layers of skin are gone from most of one side of his face. He smells like raw meat.

“You know me?” Rumlow says.

The soldier blinks, but appears to remember how to talk. “Commander,” he says, his voice rough.

“Do you remember me.”

“Yes, sir.”

He’s lying, though; the soldier is barely looking at him. He is clearly drugged—they always drug him beforehand when it’s going to be bad, for the sake of safety, not mercy—but even that doesn't explain this lack of focus. Not on him.

He should have stayed in the room with the others. Rumlow had left around the time it started getting bad, because what they did to the soldier at times like this was both distasteful and not Rumlow’s own choice. That’s what he gets for trusting anyone else to do anything right around here, he supposes.

The soldier is still standing in front of him, seemingly holding himself upright by force of will more than by any physical means. His nose has started bleeding.

“Whatever,” Rumlow says. “Get to the shower.”

 

 

Physically cleaning the soldier is very much below Rumlow’s pay grade, and it would have been easy to get someone else to do it. He could have ordered clipboard guy to do it on the spot, in fact—that would have been amusing. But it’s a good trust exercise, and more importantly, washing the soldier at a time like this always hurts him a lot, and honestly that part is just nice to watch: seeing the soldier trying to keep it together in front of Rumlow, trying to be all brave and appreciative no matter how nasty Rumlow got.

But tonight isn’t like that. The soldier still barely knows who Rumlow is, and he makes no effort to keep it together: makes no effort at anything, really. He just accepts it all: standing silently while Rumlow strips him, moving obediently into the corner of the room with the drain, jolting with surprise at the flow of cold water. When Rumlow starts scrubbing him down, he hangs his head forward and leans against the wall, moaning openly from the pain. Rumlow might as well be doing this to one of their normal prisoners. He might as well be helping an injured puppy. It’s no fun at all.

Rumlow tries to get a better look at him as he works, maneuvering to keep his own clothed body out of the cold spray of the water. The other men had fucked him, obviously, and beaten him half to death, but none of that is that unusual or enough to explain his current condition. He looks bruised all over, and his face is a fucking mess, but that’s pretty standard as well.

“What the hell did they do to you?” he says.

No answer. The soldier is staring vaguely at the floor in front of him, pink-tinted water dripping off his hair. Rumlow grabs his arm and pulls him around to face him better, then slaps him on the damaged side of his face to get his attention. It makes a loud, wet sound.

The soldier sniffs, lifts his head to look at him. His nose is still bleeding.

“What did they do?” Rumlow repeats.

He watches the soldier try to answer: the other man looks as though he’s trying to remember something that happened two decades ago, rather than half an hour. Rumlow had grabbed his human arm, and the skin is wet and cool under his grip. “I was asking them,” he says. He's looking down again now, but it seems less out of shame or deference and more from not knowing he isn’t supposed to speak to the floor. “I…”

“Speak up.”

The soldier frowns. “I asked them and they kicked me.”

“Asked them what?”

He doesn’t seem to understand the question. Rumlow lets go of his arm and grabs a handful of wet hair instead. The soldier winces. The water is still hitting him on the shoulders and back: drops of it are soaking through the fabric of Rumlow’s t-shirt, cold against his skin.

“Where did they kick you?” he asks.

“Head.”

He pulls the soldier’s hair, just a bit, to keep his attention on him. “How many times?”

The soldier looks like he’s trying to figure it out, but then he apparently loses the train of thought.

Rumlow lets go of his hair and sighs. “I’ll talk to them about that.”

Usually, the soldier would react to that: this time, he barely seems to hear.

“Turn around,” Rumlow says. “Let me finish cleaning you up.”

He does, and it continues to not be any fun. Hurting something that’s already this broken might be amusing enough for some of the other idiots here, but it’s not enough for him. If the soldier doesn’t get better quick—or if he gets worse and Rumlow has to get a doctor or organize some goddamn surgery tonight or some shit—he is going to go in tomorrow and crack some heads himself.

But for now he just does his job, because he’s a professional. Finishes cleaning the soldier, dries him off with a towel he’d brought down here with him, dresses him in new clothes. Gives him a drink of water and helps him rinse his mouth out. The soldier accepts this all, and seems slightly more able to follow instructions than he had earlier, but that might just be Rumlow being optimistic.

“There you go,” he says when he's done. The soldier stands there, looking vaguely corpselike in the harsh overhead light, but it’s still an improvement. Less blood, at least. “You tired?”

“Yes,” the soldier says.

That part is clearly the truth, at least.

“Wait there,” he says, as if the soldier was capable of doing anything else.

He steps away, stopping to dry his hands and forearms on the discarded towel, and then opens the cell door and slips out into the empty corridor to turn off the lights in the cell. Not all the lights turn off, though—there’s a faint red emergency light of some sort up in one corner that keeps glowing—and when Rumlow goes back in he can still see the soldier, who is standing there motionless like he has already been frozen.

Rumlow sits down on the edge of the bed, and pats his knee. “C’mere.”

The soldier doesn’t move. His face looks blank and vaguely terrified

Rumlow sighs. “Come. Here.”

The soldier moves, because of course he does: this is why no one bothers to lock the door to his cell, or to transport him with people who are actually good at their jobs. He comes over to him and, at Rumlow’s gesture, folds himself down to kneel on the concrete next to Rumlow's feet. Closer, Rumlow can see the expression on his face more clearly: he looks plain defeated, resigned, and it’s no fun at all.

He apparently still barely remembers who Rumlow is, but he has enough remaining brainpower to guess what he wants: the soldier leans in, reaching forward to start undoing his pants.

Rumlow stops him, pushing his hands away.

The soldier doesn’t look up at him. He doesn’t look relieved: he is probably wondering whether something worse is going to happen. He looks like he is shaking a little. His hair is still wet, dripping onto the floor, onto the toes of Rumlow's boots.

“Here,” Rumlow says, and reaches out for him. “Just stay right here.”

He presses on the soldier’s head, gently moving him until the side of the soldier’s face rests against Rumlow’s thigh.

The soldier is tense and moves awkwardly, but he lets him, and keeps his head there. He doesn’t move for a long time, and wetness slowly soaks through Rumlow's pants from the soldier’s hair. Rumlow rests his hand firm on the back of the soldier’s neck. The only sound is the dripping from the bad taps in the shower.

It takes a long time, but the soldier relaxes, very slightly, the tension in his neck easing, his breathing slowing down. Rumlow rubs the back of his neck: the soldier’s skin is so warm again already, even after the cold water of the shower. He takes his time, because even if nothing else is going as planned, at least sitting like this in the dark is nice enough. It’s not like he’s particularly horny anyway, not with the soldier in this miserable state.

So he just stays like that, rubbing the back of the soldier’s neck and his shoulders. “There,” he says. “Isn’t that better?”

The soldier nods, and then he moves to wrap his right arm around Rumlow’s legs.

That’s—very good. The soldier has done that before, and that means he remembers, or close to it.

He’s getting better. Rumlow won’t have to crack heads after all. Not hard, anyway.

He pets his hair some more, and the soldier pushes his face harder against his thigh. Finally, he speaks.

“I didn’t do anything,” he says. His voice is low and flat, more like he’s replying to a question Rumlow asked than making a declaration. “I don’t know what I did.”

Rumlow wouldn’t have his job if he wasn’t good at putting together the weird broken fragments that make up the soldier’s attempts at human experience, so he figures it out. “That’s what you asked them?” he says, still rubbing his neck. “Before they kicked you? You asked them what you did wrong?”

The soldier nods against his leg, and then takes a deep shaky breath. "I didn't do anything," he says again.

Rumlow almost smiles. It’s—almost touching, really. That someone who has experienced everything that the soldier has could still somehow believe that life was fair; that the people hurting him must be doing so for a reason.

He forces the amused expression off his face: it might be pretty dark in here, but the soldier’s eyesight is good. “Hey,” he says and then moves his hand and turns the soldier’s head to look up at him.

The soldier looks. His eyes look very dark in this light.

Rumlow has this particular job and all its perks because he is nice, and because he knows what is best for the soldier. So he lies.

“You were sloppy,” he says. “Slow. Everything took too long today.”

It’s only mostly false. Everything had taken too long, but that hadn’t been the soldier’s fault, and even in his damaged state the soldier must be able to sense the bullshit, because he looks indignant. “I didn’t…”

“You were bad,” Rumlow says, firm.

“None of that was my fault,” the soldier says.

He’s genuinely indignant, and it’s finally there again, the spark of friction that makes the soldier so fun to deal with. Playing out endlessly in his brain, like an irritant in a wound that stops it from healing—the poor wretch never stops trying, and you can get decades of amusement out of that.

This time, Rumlow can’t help but let himself smile. But then he forces it off his face and straightens up a bit, taking his hand off the soldier’s head.

“Oh really?” he says. “You wanna explain exactly how I’m wrong, then?”

The soldier scowls and doesn’t answer. He’s glaring, but even in the dim light Rumlow can see that his expression is uncertain, his eyes fixed desperately on Rumlow’s face.

He wants badly to trust him, Rumlow can see it. He wants it so badly.

Something in that look—the openness of it, the vulnerability—makes Rumlow want to break that trust, split it open and crush it. Makes him want to tell him the truth. Tell him Pierce hates you. He orders the men to hurt you because he fucking hates you, and you don’t even remember why, and you never will.

But he isn’t stupid. He is not going to jeopardize the fact that right now they can keep the soldier in here like this, with the door unlocked, with no restraints. It's not worth it.

“You just finished drooling all over the fucking floor, and now you’re going to correct me about how our day went?" he says instead. "That it? I'm all ears. Enlighten me.”

The soldier scowls some more, but finally he drops his head again, and presses his face once more into Rumlow’s leg. But it has worked. The soldier doesn’t telegraph these type of emotions as well as he does pain, but there’s a change in the posture of his body: the soldier might be pissed off, but he is also relieved. Personal failure, even personal failure that doesn’t match up with his own memories of a few hours ago, is a far better option than the idea of being punished for nothing.

Rumlow lets him rest like that, lets it all sink in for a little while.  “Come on,” he says eventually. “Let’s get you into bed.”

 

 

He is gentle with the soldier, later, genuinely slow and careful, but there wasn’t ever going to be a way to make it not hurt, not after what they'd done to him before. But the soldier is already better, already himself again. He remembers Rumlow properly now, can tell he’s being gentle, and so—he tries. Rolling over into the right position when Rumlow tells him to, bracing himself against the bed’s stiff white sheets when Rumlow starts, and Rumlow finally gets what he wants, the soldier desperately hiding how much pain he is in, trying to do his best for him. The tenseness, the tightness in his jaw, the forced neutral expression when the soldier looks at him…

... and then it all falls apart after, like it always does, and the soldier starts to cry.

“Shh,” Rumlow says, and he lets the soldier rest his head against his shoulder, pets his damp hair. “It’s okay. You did your best.”

 

 

 

Notes:

Please leave a comment and let me know if you’re reading this and want more! I respond like a trained lab rat to feedback and will abandon everything without it, so I need to know if anyone is actually reading this.

Chapter 4

 

The soldier is way worse now.

Staring at him from the floor of the shower, still naked and wet from Rumlow cleaning him off again, back pressed against the tiled wall, knees clumsily in front of him, vacant as a dead thing. He’s pale and dull all over, except for the mutilated area around his left shoulder, which is bright red and inflamed-looking all the way up to his neck, as if something in there is infected. He had not objected to being touched, and now he doesn’t seem to notice that Rumlow has stopped.

He looks fucking bad, and it hadn’t occurred to Rumlow until now that what is happening right now might not just be drug withdrawal, and might not be something the soldier gets over—that Hydra might have pumped him with something slow-release and deadly that would just melt his brain completely. Rumlow has never seen the soldier reach this stage before; he has no idea what happens next. The only person who might know is unconscious two stories beneath them.

But Rumlow hasn’t come this far by being pessimistic about the soldier’s endurance, so he will ignore it for now. He might as well assume the best, since there is fuck-all else he can do. His plans are useless without the soldier.

He makes his way to the bathroom sink, where he fills up one of the shiny glasses sitting on its granite surface. He returns, the soles of his boots splashing in the water left on the shower floor, and holds out the full glass to the soldier.

For a moment, the soldier simply stares. Then finally, in the first real sign of higher brain activity since Rumlow had entered the bathroom, he shakes his head. Water drips off the ends of his hair with the motion. 

Rumlow steps forward and shoves the glass closer. His movements are clumsy enough that some of the liquid sloshes out. “Drink,” he says, louder, and the soldier’s slack expression hardens into blind, childish anger. His left arm twitches.

Whatever, Rumlow thinks. If the soldier snaps and punches him, he’ll die quickly at least.

He pushes the water forward again, so that the glass is almost touching the soldier’s mouth. The soldier’s metal hand twitches again, rises, drops, and then slowly comes up. His hand wraps around the glass, metal hitting the surface with a loud clink. Slowly, he tips it back to his mouth and drinks. A little bit of water drips off his jaw. 

So the idiot still has enough conditioning left to respond to shows of authority. That’s something Rumlow can work with.

He still smells of flowery grandma soap Rumlow had used to wash him with, and watching the soldier finish the glass dead-eyed and wipe his mouth with a grimace while smelling like that is akin to the experience of killing a man with one of those crocheted toilet roll covers. 

Rumlow reaches out for the empty glass, and then the soldier suddenly speaks.

“Take this thing off of me,” he says. His voice is quiet, even in the echoey tiles of the shower.

“What?” Rumlow says, too quickly. It’s a miracle soldier can even talk given how fucked up he looks, but also—what the hell is he talking about? He’s not tied up; he’s not even wearing anything. “What d’you mean, soldier?”

The soldier’s face crumples for a second, like Rumlow had asked the question in order to deliberately fuck with him. He recovers, but it takes him a long time to put more words together. “Get it off me,” he repeats.

“You’re not making sense, kid,” Rumlow says, grabbing the glass back.

The soldier’s face crumples again, like he is looking for more words and can’t find them. His human fist clenches where it’s resting on his bare right knee. It’s kind of—admirable, really, him being half-dead and still working so hard.

Rumlow waits, letting the soldier struggle. He is struggling, more than Rumlow had realized: he is tense and almost trembling, his chest moving with his quick breathing.

“Что ты делаешь со мной,” he says softly, so softly that Rumlow is not even sure he’s actually trying to talk out loud. What are you doing to me.

“Hydra is gone now,” Rumlow says. “You used to belong to Hydra, but now you belong to me. Do you understand?”

The soldier stares in his direction, blinking.

“Do you understand,” Rumlow says again.

“No,” says the soldier mildly.

“That’s because Hydra did a shitty goddamn job,” Rumlow says.

 

---

 

 Hydra’s former finest assassin had succeeded too well at his earlier task for the doctor to be any help: the man is still mostly unconscious in the basement bathroom, and he barely responds when Rumlow slaps him, does not answer any questions.

“Fuck,” he says. So much about being careful about brain damage.

But there probably isn’t much the doctor could do anyway. If the soldier is being poisoned, it’s not like every random Hydra-affiliated doctor would still be carrying around the antidote. So he just double-checks that he’s tied up well enough, goes upstairs to take another pill, and then gets on with a bunch of stuff that he really could have used the soldier’s help for.

The gate outside is still disabled, so he moves the car into the property, brings the rest of his gear and the soldier’s backpack into the house. Reactivates the gate—he can worry about the other security stuff later. There had been other plans, too, but the giant living room on the first floor has a giant couch and a full bar, and it has been a long fucking day and the soldier might die tonight, which means Rumlow’s plan is fucked and tomorrow he’ll have to get around to killing the doctor and himself. Talk about a shitty to-do list.

He falls asleep on the couch an hour later, and when he wakes up in the morning it is over.

 

---

 

In the bathroom upstairs, the soldier has moved himself into the bathtub, which is almost long enough to accommodate his height. He’s curled up under the blanket Rumlow had brought in yesterday, and there are no surprise bodily fluids. He looks not-dead and almost peaceful.

It’s a fucking miracle. The doctor is awake too, judging from all the yelling Rumlow had heard while he was getting himself up the stairs. Maybe they’ll survive to the end of the day after all.

He leans against the door frame, rubbing the side of his head. The lights are still on, and he can see that the soldier is pretending to be asleep again now, and is even doing a reasonable job of it. He steps into the room, goes over to the toilet, flips the seat up. The soldier still doesn’t move.

Rumlow says: “I know you’re not sleeping through a guy taking a piss five feet from your head. Wake the fuck up.”

The soldier’s eyes crack open. He looks pissed off, which is a good sign: that’s closer to normal for him. Rumlow smiles to himself briefly as he washes his hands. It’s remarkable, how well he heals. The soldier might even be up to getting this shit started right away. “How you feeling?”

“My head hurts,” the soldier says. His voice is weak and croaky, like he has ten times the hangover Rumlow does.

“Mine too,” Rumlow says. “Stand up, and get out of the bath.”

The soldier hesitates but then does it, but sways, his balance off as Rumlow steps closer to him.

“Stand still,” Rumlow snaps. “I’m trying to get a look at you.”

He tries, and Rumlow grabs the blanket that the soldier is still holding and drops it aside. The soldier scowls, but relaxes into it: being inspected physically is something he is used to.

He still looks like crap: pale, patches of skin on his face and neck dry and almost peeling, his lips are so cracked the bottom one has split near the middle. Way more concerning is his shoulder: now that the soldier is upright, the area around seam where the skin turns to metal looks odd, as if the arm has been wrenched out of place and not put back in right.

“It’ll have to do,” Rumlow says. The soldier is still dazed, but maybe that’s actually a feature and not a bug at this point. “Wait there, and let’s get you dressed.”

The soldier’s clothes are still in a wet pile on the floor of the shower where he had briefly rinsed them off last night. Rumlow brings them back, prompts the soldier to pull them back on, followed by his shoes: by the end of it, the soldier is cringing and shivering and looks about as uncomfortable as you’d expect for someone who has just been forced back into wet and not-very-clean clothes. But he is still upright.

“Better?” Rumlow asks.

The soldier gives him a look that can almost definitely be interpreted as are you fucking kidding me. His lower lip is bleeding a little.

“Good,” Rumlow says like he had been given an actual answer. “Now. We’re both gonna go downstairs to see a doctor.”

 

 

 

Chapter 5

 “That’s crazy,” Reyner says. “I can’t.”

Rumlow is leaning on the edge of the sink, above where the doctor is huddled on the floor next to the toilet, hands still fastened with cable ties. The soldier’s next to him, upright, looming above them both and doing a good job of looking reasonably stable. Rumlow doesn’t answer, so the doctor just stumbles onwards verbally. “I—I don’t have enough of my equipment here, or—”

“Then I’ll fucking get it myself,” Rumlow says. “I know the fancy stuff you guys had access to. Plus, anything you have will be better than the shitty hospital they stuck me in.”

The doctor blinks, shrinks back a little into the wall behind him. He looks over at the soldier, and the sight is apparently scary enough: after closing his eyes for a second he says: “Okay. Show me, then.” He adds: “I’ll need my hands to examine you.”

He’s trying to sound confident now, clearly, but it doesn’t work much when you’re tied up on a floor beside a toilet.

Rumlow uses the knife he keeps on his belt to cut through the cable ties, and Reyner gets to his feet, unsteady. For a second he looks as pale and sick as the soldier had yesterday, even though Rumlow had fed him last night. He steps over to wash his hands in the sink, walking in a little arc across the narrow room so he can avoid the soldier as much as possible, and then takes hold of the hand Rumlow holds out to him.

The doctor’s fingers fingers are damp against the skin of his own hand, too cool. Just the touch makes Rumlow want to go for the stun baton that’s still on his belt. Up this close, he smells like old sweat and faintly of bathroom cleaner.

“These should have been splinted better,” he says, looking at Rumlow’s fingers. The overhead lights in the bathroom are bright, and it’s really obvious in this light just how much of a fucking mess they are.

“I was a little busy,” Rumlow says.

He turns the hand over, examining. “It’s not as bad as it could be. I don’t think you’ll need grafts, at least. I can—”

“Stop fucking talking about it and start planning for an outcome that lets you live.”

The doctor nods, swallows, and finally the damp fingers let him go. He looks at Rumlow, squaring his shoulders a little. “I’ll need to see your knee, as well.”

The next few minutes pass very unpleasantly. The soldier continues to stare at them in silence, and barely seems to actually be able to focus at this point, but it’s okay: the doctor doesn’t notice, he’s too busy groping Rumlow’s knee all over like a fucking pervert.

“I can try,” the doctor says finally, after he stands again and lets Rumlow pull his pants back up. “Maybe. But I won’t be able to knock you out for it. General anesthetic would require—”

“I know how fucking general anesthetic works.” Rumlow finishes doing up his belt, and pulls the half-empty orange pill bottle out of his pocket. “I’m gonna need a lot more of these, as well. Write out something for them or whatever doctor shit you gotta do.”

The doctor looks at the pills, and then up at Rumlow, blinking slowly. “Are you sure you want to keep on taking so many—”

“I’m not an addict, are you fucking blind? I am in fucking pain.”

“Addicts can be in pain.”

“Oh, how touching. Poetic. You’re gonna be in fucking pain soon unless you get me something good, doc. Something for the surgery, too. Maybe then I won’t get mad and kill you halfway through.”

But the doctor just keeps giving him that look. It’s the same look he has seen before from a lot of doctors: the ones at his last hospital, the ones from a bunch of his injuries before that. The ones from the first time his hand had been broken, a long time ago. The same look. Like Rumlow is just a patient, with no control, no power of choice, no power over anything.

It’s clear the soldier is the only one the doctor is actually afraid of, and Rumlow needs to do something about that.

Rumlow shoves the pills back in his pocket. There’s a good chance that what he’s going to do will backfire, he knows, but that’s just the way things are right now.

“Hey,” he says to the soldier. “You. Come here.”

The soldier stares for a second and then steps toward him, and next to Rumlow, the doctor takes an automatic step back. A little thudding sound as his back hits the towel rack next to the sink.

Rumlow raises his good hand, like he’s beckoning, but then reaches up, quick—not too quick for the soldier to stop him if he wanted to, of course—and grabs the soldier by the hair.

He yanks the soldier toward him like that, and the soldier hisses, bears his teeth like an animal about to strike and then—

Does nothing. He goes limp in his grasp, his head dipping forward a little so that his gaze is on the bright tiled floor. Rumlow can almost see the muscles in his upper back and shoulders relaxing through the fabric of his clothes.

“You gonna take care of this guy while I’m sick?” Rumlow asks him.

It seems to take the soldier a moment to process the question, but then he nods, as much as he can with Rumlow’s hand still tight in his hair. His hair feels silky against Rumlow’s fingers, unusually clean from being washed.

“Answer me.”

“Yes,” the soldier says dully, eyes still on the floor.

“And if he messes up, you’ll take care of him, right?”

“Yes,” the soldier says again.

He barely sounds like he understands, honestly, but it does the job: Reyner’s face is very white, and the condescending-doctor look is gone.

“You won’t kill me,” he says, eventually, his voice quiet. “If I help you?”

Rumlow smiles at him, lets go of the soldier’s hair.

“Of course I won’t,” he says.

---

The soldier follows him back upstairs from the basement and into the filthy kitchen. The doctor had asked for an hour to begin to plan, and there’s a good chance he’ll just spend that time crying and plotting dumb escape attempts, but whatever; Rumlow is hungry right now anyway.

“Sit down,” Rumlow says. There’s an open dining area right next to the kitchen that’s mostly taken up by a large wooden table. It’s just as covered in trash as everything else in the house, but it’ll keep the soldier out of the way while he finds them some food. He gestures towards the table, but the soldier doesn’t move, just stands there looking at him.

“What?” Rumlow snaps.

Silence, a long silence this time, like the soldier has forgotten how to talk entirely. Finally he says: “You are going to kill him.”

“Of course I’m gonna fucking kill him. Do I look like an idiot?”

The soldier doesn’t answer, just glares down at the dirty floor.

“Sit down,” Rumlow repeats, and the soldier glares some more, but finally does it, dragging out one of the heavy chairs back from the table and sitting down in it silently.

He turns on the light—he’d closed all the curtains last night, and the weather is pretty dismal outside anyway—and kicks aside a stray shopping bag full of trash to get to the pantry. The shelves are scattered with packets of snack food that the doctor had obviously stocked up on at some point, and it had been enough for Rumlow to raid for a quick meal last night, but the soldier needs something more substantial. He hasn’t eaten anything since they got here, and probably not for some time before that, as well. Which would explain why he’s acting like his body is trying to cannibalize his brain tissue.

All the meat in the doctor’s fridge has gone bad, but there are eggs in there at least. “Fuck, I’d kill for some bacon right now,” Rumlow says.

“Why am I here,” the soldier says.

Rumlow closes the fridge, sets the box of eggs down top of the clearest space he can find on the countertop, and turns to face the soldier, who is glaring at him from the table. “You weren’t listening down there? I need you to make sure the doctor does his job and doesn’t kill me.”

“Someone else could do that.”

“Why the fuck does it matter to you why? You weren’t taking care of yourself. Look at you. You couldn’t even shower.”

“I can shower,” the soldier mumbles.

“Whatever, kid. You should be happy it was me that found you.”

The soldier keeps glaring. He looks angry and suspicious and underneath all that, deeply, deeply confused. It’s a nice expression to look at, to be honest. “You—” he says and then stops, wincing a little, angry at his own incomprehension. “You used me as a punching bag once.”

“I was better to you than anyone else, and nicer than anyone there was to me, so stop fucking complaining.”

No answer: the soldier just stares, silent and angry. It’s like one of those sci-fi shows where the hero asks a computer an impossible question and it keeps thinking until it blows up. Finally he says: “Pierce was nice to me.”

“Pierce was nice to me,” Rumlow imitates. “Well, Pierce is fucking dead. What do you think about that?”

The soldier glares up at him for a long moment, and then, suddenly, kicks the table leg that’s closest to his foot. The thick wood splits, the heavy table jerking and tipping downwards even as the entire structure skids away a couple of feet across the wooden floor. One of the chairs on the other side tips over onto its back, hits the floor with a crack like a gunshot.

Rumlow takes a tiny step back.

In front of him, the soldier is still seated, staring down at the broken table. His eyes are wide, like he had forgotten he could do that. He looks up at Rumlow, and then down again. He looks absolutely dumbfounded, and clearly he hadn’t noticed Rumlow’s reaction.

Rumlow exhales. Then he straightens up, wipes any trace of surprise off his face.

“Jesus Christ,” he says. “You’re like a fucking child. You know that?” The soldier looks up at him, blinks, and he goes on: “How the hell did you manage to survive so long away from Hydra? How did you not fall down a storm drain or get caught in a plastic fence and strangle yourself?”

“Fuck you.”

“Oh, very good. ‘Fuck you.’ Amazing use of language. You been practicing that in the mirror?”

The soldier doesn’t answer for a minute. He is trembling a little now, but it’s not fearful trembling—it reminds him of the rumbling sound he has heard, once or twice, before an earthquake. “You,” he says. “You need to…”

“What,” Rumlow says. You had to be on the offensive with the soldier when he got like this, no matter how messed up he is. You just had to dive right in and run directly towards danger.

He steps forward: he wants to get closer, more in the soldier’s line of sight.

“You—” the soldier tries again. He looks down at his hands, twisting and gripping with his metal fingers, then back up at Rumlow. Rumlow reacts by stepping closer.

It seems to work—the angry trembling is still there, but when he speaks again, his voice is has quietened.

“They pulled my hair,” he says, sounding thoughtful.

“It’s okay,” Rumlow says. He keeps going, closer.

"They..." he says and trails off. "You did it too. Downstairs."

Rumlow just keeps moving, gets right in front of him, in the space vacated by the now-broken table. “It’s okay,” he says again, gentle, and it’s all working fine, he’s going to be all reassuring again now, and he will calm the soldier down and then he will feed him something. That’s his plan, because he is not a monster and because the soldier obviously really needs some fucking food and Rumlow is pretty hungry himself…

…but of course, then the soldier fucks it all up.

Rumlow is close, and he reaches out to touch him where he's still sitting in the chair, but the soldier yells “NO” —

— and shoves him away hard enough to knock him down.

Rumlow's on the floor, on his back and starting to sit up already, dirt digging into his palms and forearms. He’s not dead—it must have been the soldier’s right arm—but his whole body is yelling in pain, the damaged parts of him screaming.

“Don’t—pull—my—hair,” the soldier says.

The pain all turns to boiling rage in his gut. Rumlow pulls himself up and doesn’t hesitate. He should have expected something like this, because the soldier is confused and damaged and has been pretending to be human for a while, even if he’d failed at it so hard, and he needs a lot of new behavior beaten out of him. In one quick motion, one that hurts like hell but which almost manages to make him feel like his old self, he grabs a handful of the soldier's hair and then yanks him up out of the chair.

The soldier growls, wincing and showing his teeth, but once again does absolutely nothing to resist. He lets Rumlow pull him to his feet.

“Don’t pull your hair, huh?” Rumlow twists the handful of long hair in his hand, grabbing tighter, uses it to shake the soldier back and forth like he’s a disobedient animal. The soldier moans, but still doesn’t resist. Rumlow lets go, slaps him across the face with his good hand. And then does it again, because he still hurts and because it feels good. “Look at me.”

The soldier does. He looks sick, pale and confused and angry, the split in his lower lip broken open and bleeding. Rumlow grabs his chin. “Okay,” he says, “we are gonna finish our talk now. Because I don’t want to listen to any more of your bullshit. I rescued you, soldier. I saved you. Your body was giving out and you didn’t even know it.”

“I—”

“Do not fucking talk back to me.”

That works—he drops his eyes—and Rumlow keeps going. “First Hydra rescued you, Hydra saved you, and you paid them back by being a little shit half of the time. But maybe that’s not your fault, because you’re pretty goddamn stupid.”

The soldier twitches, like those words genuinely hurt.

“But then you fuck up for real, and you run away and leave the rest of us to deal with it—” he cuts off any argument by shifting his grip from the soldier's chin to his jaw, grabbing down harder “—and I am forced to come track you down like you’re runaway livestock, and then how the fuck do you thank me?”

He loosens his grip, but the soldier still doesn’t speak. He is still looking at the floor.

“Oh, you don’t want to talk now? What about just now when you were being a little bitch? Pretty vocal then, huh?”

The soldier still doesn’t speak: apart from his breathing, the room is quiet enough to hear the soft hum of the central heating.

“You belonged to Hydra,” Rumlow says. “Now you belong to me. And I’m treating you a lot better than they did, let’s get fucking honest about that. Did I complain about you crying about not wanting to kill people? Did I complain last night when I had to clean up your fucking waste?”

He feels the muscle in the soldier’s jaw jump as he clenches his teeth. Something finally seems to firm up inside him: he looks up at Rumlow, eyes narrowed. “It’s not nice to pull people’s hair.”

Rumlow doesn’t get angry, or hit him again. He laughs instead, because it really is funny. He grips down tighter on his jaw again for emphasis as he speaks, so that it feels like his fingers are bruising bone. “You—are—not—a—person. You are a science experiment. You’re like if one of those fucking baking soda volcanos somehow learned to talk and now it won’t fucking shut up. The only person here is the one that saved your goddamn life, and you need to learn that.” He grips harder. “Or is that too much to ask? Do you want me to send you to someone else?”

The raw terror in the soldier’s eyes only lasts for half a second before he closes them, but it’s long enough.

“What are we going to do about this, then,” Rumlow says. “How are you going to learn?”

Unsurprisingly, he does not get an answer. The soldier’s jaw is clenched tight, his breathing loud and not quite steady, and his eyes are still closed like that is going to make the entire situation go away.

Rumlow lets go of his face, and reaches for the stun baton on his own belt.

 

 

Chapter 6

The soldier must hear Rumlow grab hold of the baton, because he opens his eyes and looks down at it, and then away, like he can’t bear to see. Blood is still oozing out of his lower lip, and he is trembling again, but this time the trembling is clearly not restrained anger, or frustration, or anything but naked fear.

Clearly it’s not just the baton that the soldier is scared of, not really—although, of course, the soldier doesn’t know that it’s not the enhanced type. He knows that punishment is coming, but he probably doesn’t even know exactly what he is afraid of: underneath the fear on his face the soldier just looks bewildered, a child in a dark room.

It’s so pathetic to watch, so cowardly, that it makes Rumlow want to hit him again, make him bleed more. It’s always like that, watching someone so physically strong react like a broken animal, and the soldier had never figured this out in all his years with Hydra—that all of his shows of desperate submission just made everything so much worse for him.

But Rumlow resists the urge. Slapping the soldier around a bit would be satisfying, but it’s not the best course of action. Instead, he just takes hold of the other man’s jaw again—gentler now, with his bad hand this time. He tilts the soldier’s head down a little to look at him directly. “You know what’s gonna happen?” he says.

The soldier nods, the rough skin on his chin scratching against Rumlow’s fingertips. It’s clearly a lie, though, and Rumlow can't help but wonder just what the soldier’s fucked-up brain does think will happen. It was beyond even Rumlow’s job description to deal with the type of punishment that the soldier would get after doing something as monumentally stupid as assaulting a superior. Hydra had machines to deal with things like that. Machines behind closed doors, operated by people who Rumlow greatly outranked but still avoided in the corridor.

Maybe the soldier thinks he’ll take him back downstairs to the doctor. Maybe he thinks Rumlow will just send him back, somehow.

Whatever it is, the soldier is shaking like a cornered prey animal. The metal baton is a satisfying, tempting weight in Rumlow’s hand.

But he doesn’t raise it. He just shifts his grip on the soldier’s jaw, stroking over the stubbled skin. “You’re confused,” he says. “Not thinking straight. You’ve been all fucked up for a while.”

The soldier nods, more to show compliance than as any indication that he’d actually understood him.

“And you’re hungry,” Rumlow goes on. He lets go of the soldier, and shoves the baton back into its holster.

The soldier glances down again, and then looks so confused that Rumlow can’t help but laugh. “You’re fine, kid,” he says, and pats his cheek. “Relax. I’m gonna feed you.”

The soldier keeps staring at him. His face looks like a computer screen showing an error message.

“You’re hungry,” Rumlow repeats, then gestures with his head toward the trash-covered main area of the kitchen. “Sit on one of the stools near the bench, since you fucked up the table. I'll make some food.”

The direct order works to wake him up: the soldier moves, finally. Rumlow pats him on the shoulder and heads back towards the stove, and the soldier sits down where he has been told to sit and just stares at him for a while, looking like he is going to cry.

 

 

It is gentleness that breaks him, always has been, and Rumlow stays gentle with him. Feeds him, gives him one of the electrolyte drinks he finds way back on a shelf in the doctor’s pantry. Takes him back upstairs after, guiding the soldier firmly but carefully, like he’s a beloved relative recovering from surgery. The soldier accepts all of this silently: he’s clearly confused, but on the other hand, the soldier is extremely accustomed by now to just going along with things.

The guest bedroom whose bathroom they’d used before is clean, unlike the rest of the house: there’s a king-sized bed that’s still neatly made up, and furniture that isn’t covered in crap, carpet that’s clean except for some mud the soldier had tracked onto it the night before. Rumlow guides the soldier to the side of the bed, pulls the curtains closed over the window next to it so that the dust motes floating in the bright air disappear.

The soldier waits, unmoving, his back to the neat bed, and then tenses up a little when Rumlow tells him to take off his clothes.

“I need to wash them, idiot,” Rumlow says. “You still smell.”

The soldier may or may not believe him, but he follows the order regardless, stripping off his clothes with such practiced speed and efficiency that it’s almost depressing to think about, and setting them down in a pile beside him.

It’s still mid-morning outside, and even with the curtains closed the room is light enough to see the soldier clearly as he finishes undressing and stands naked, hunched over a little, his head down. The stubble on his face is probably too long now to be called stubble anymore, but the hair on the rest of his body has not grown back. God knows what they’d done to him to get rid of that permanently; another thing that it’s best not to think about. The new marks on his left shoulder are visible even in this light, spreading out dark and ugly from his shoulder. The look of it worries Rumlow, briefly, but he can set that aside for later.

“Get in the bed,” he says.

The soldier raises his head to stare at him dumbly.

Rumlow almost laughs. “Lie—down—on—top—of—the—mattress—right—here. I want you to stay in here and rest. Use the bathroom if you need to, clean yourself up. Get some fucking sleep.”’

The soldier blinks, and then actually looks over his shoulder at the bed, like he’s confused about whether it’s still there. Rumlow actually does laugh this time.

The soldier tenses angrily at that, but apparently decides not to react: he turns and draws back the sheets and bedspread, lies down on the bed without taking his eyes off of him. The confusion on his face has changed to defiance, as if he’s now preparing for Rumlow to change his mind. He pulls the blankets back up around himself with a distinct these are mine and I earned them gesture. It looks ridiculous, and Rumlow can’t help laughing again. The soldier glares and looks away.

“Rest,” Rumlow says. “Get better.”

He can feel the soldier’s eyes on him as he leaves the room.

 

 

There’s a lot of shit to do while he waits for the soldier to—hopefully—get less fucked up. Getting acquainted with the house’s security system, acquiring a list of supplies off the doctor, looking for some of those supplies in the house, figuring out how the fuck he is going to get the rest of them. And between all that, he spends a chunk of what might be the last day of his life doing laundry.

He washes his own spare clothes, and the soldier’s, in the doctor’s big fancy washing machine. The laundry room in the basement is large, but clean and empty: the doctor clearly hadn’t bothered to try to do any laundry himself. That is a big difference between them, he thinks: Rumlow at least knows how to get unwanted shit done.

He goes through the soldier’s backpack, as well, while he’s waiting for the dryer to be done. It’s still encrusted with dirt, and it contains pretty much what Rumlow had expected, with some exceptions: for one, there are no weapons, not even a pocketknife. And, down near the bottom of the pack, there’s a damp, tattered brochure from the Captain America exhibit at the Smithsonian.

Huh. So the soldier knows all about that, but he’d decided to run in the opposite direction. Interesting.

He brings the soldier food in the afternoon, but doesn’t stay, and when he goes back later in the evening the soldier is awake, still lying on the bed with the covers wrapped around him.

Rumlow turns on the lamp next to the bed, holds out one of the nearly-expired protein bars he’d found in the pantry. “This’ll have to do for a snack right now. You feeling better?”

The soldier sits up enough to take the bar from Rumlow’s hand, sets it on the nightstand absently, then straightens up, back pressed against the wooden headboard. He doesn’t answer.

“You need anything else?”

He shakes his head, but only after a pause. His eyes stay fixed on Rumlow, and maybe the soldier doesn’t remember how familiar that look is to him.

“You want me to stay here with you?”

The soldier visibly clenches his teeth. “No.”

“You sure about that?”

The soldier looks away. Finally, he shakes his head. He immediately winces like he’s angry at himself, but doesn’t speak.

Rumlow refrains from gloating, or reacting much at all: there's no need, they both already know what’s going on. He sits down on the edge of the bed, takes off his boots slowly, careful with his injured hand. The soldier stays silent, but Rumlow can feel the anger and loathing radiating off him like heat, and the nice part is that none of it is directed at Rumlow. No matter how much everything else sucks in his life right now, no matter how much his sternum still aches from the soldier shoving him and how long it takes him to undo his own fucking boots, this part of playing with the soldier is much more fun than before. The soldier understands his own actions right now in a way that he never had before, knows what they say about himself, and he hates himself for it.

And he still lies down, and lets Rumlow get into bed next to him.

It’s almost uncomfortably warm under the covers from the soldier’s body heat, and he must have showered again at some point today, because his skin smells like the weird flowery soap again. It’s not so bad, actually, once you get used to it and force yourself to stop thinking of old lady perfume. Rumlow pulls him closer, and the soldier lets him turn him onto his side so they’re facing each other, the soldier’s face half-shadowy in the light from the lamp, his cheek against the pillow. It’s easy to know what to do from here: it has always been easy to just work the soldier over to see what he likes, figure out what makes him flinch away and what makes him twitch in closer and moan. The soldier is no good at hiding these things—who knows if he can hide them—and it’s all as simple as training a not-very-bright dog, and yet as far as he knows, Rumlow is the only one who ever bothered to take advantage of this fact.

He takes advantage of it now, rubbing one hand up and down along the stiff muscles in the soldier’s back, stroking his face, kissing his messy hair. The soldier barely holds out for thirty seconds before he just melts into it, and soon he’s moving in closer, clutching onto Rumlow’s arm like one of them is drowning. With his right hand, thankfully. His left arm is curled up under him in a way that looks painful, the metal hand clenched into a tight fist. When Rumlow pushes his good hand down below the flat skin of the soldier’s stomach, the soldier's hand clamps down painfully on the scarred skin of Rumlow’s arm, and he turns his face into the pillow.

Despite all the dramatics, his dick comes to life in Rumlow’s hand like no one had ever touched it before.

And honestly, that’s just fucking amazing. You’d think anyone who had been through a tenth of the shit that the soldier has would be so fucked in the head that their dick would shut down permanently, but apparently the soldier’s junk is going to be in perfect working order forever, no matter how much he seems to not want it to be. And how’s that for a monkey’s paw situation when it comes to superpowers?

Rumlow laughs, and the soldier must hear him, because he presses his face further into the fabric of the pillowcase. His whole body is tensing, straining, like it’s already an effort not to move.

“Shhh,” Rumlow says. “It’s okay, I’m here. Not gonna hurt you.” He shifts closer to kiss next to the soldier’s ear, his jaw, and he keeps his hand working on him all the while, down under the sheets. After a while the soldier stops pushing his face down against the pillow, and eases it back toward Rumlow, relaxes a bit like he’s given up. His hair has fallen over his face, but Rumlow can just see his closed eyes, the cut on his lip that hasn’t healed. He looks dazed, half-awake. His hips move steadily up into Rumlow’s hand, jerking up into his fist.

“Good, isn’t it,” Rumlow says and the soldier doesn’t answer. His skin is so hot now, his breathing hard enough to disturb the hair over his face. His hand hasn’t let go of Rumlow’s arm. He starts moaning.

“Good,” Rumlow says again, gently: “You’re doing so good,” and the soldier makes a pathetic noise and comes over Rumlow’s hand.

Rumlow keeps going, milking it out of him, slows down only gradually with the soldier’s breathing. He lets go, wipes his hand on an unobtrusive patch of bedding, almost glad at the opportunity to mess up the doctor’s expensive sheets even though he has to sleep on them. He settles back down opposite where the soldier is still on his side: he is breathing steadily in and out, eyes closed like he’s trying to block everything out. Like he can hide from any of it. The sharp smell of the soldier’s come is in the air, and he’s dripping with sweat.

“You liked that, huh,” Rumlow says.

“Fuck you,” the soldier says, his eyes still closed. Then, weaker: “Go away. Please.”

“Shh,” Rumlow says. “You know that’s not the way to speak to me.”

“Go away,” the soldier says again, his voice rough and croaky. He makes no effort to move, though, even to flinch away.

“Nah,” Rumlow says. “C’mere.”

“Please,” the soldier says again, and then fails to resist as Rumlow wraps his arms around him, pulls him in. He stays like that, rigid and awkward and too warm against him, until, finally, he starts to cry.

The crying sounds almost angry at first, and there’s some more attempts at swearing mixed in there, but that all fades quickly. And then it’s just like it used to be, and Rumlow rubs the soldier’s back and shushes him gently and lets it happen, like he always used to when the soldier cried. Lets it happen until the uneven breathing dies down and the soldier goes quiet like there’s nothing left in him anymore.

When the soldier is still and silent, Rumlow turns off the lamp.

He sleeps well that night.

 

 

 

Chapter 7

Notes:

life is hell

 

The soldier is reluctant to leave the bed the next morning, maybe because he’s still naked, or maybe because he just wants to sulk. When Rumlow comes back from the bathroom after taking his first pain pill of the morning, he’s sitting up on the bed, eating the protein bar Rumlow had brought him last night. He is, somehow, eating it in a way that looks both reluctant and pissed off, even though you’d think he’d be ravenous. When Rumlow turns on the lamp—it’s still barely light outside—the soldier ignores him.

There’s a chair not far from the bed that’s comfortable-looking enough, even if it’s made out of a weird pink velvet material with roses on it. Rumlow sits down on it, facing the soldier, and the soldier glares at him from the bed from behind the hair that’s hanging in his face.

“You have to go out today,” Rumlow says, shifting his bad leg so it doesn’t hurt so bad. “Into town. Alone. You think you can manage that?”

No answer; the soldier just keeps glaring. He has finished the protein bar, and the wrapper is lying on the sheets beside him. With the long hair and the lack of clothes, he looks like he has just been defrosted from out of a prehistoric cave somewhere. Except for the arm, of course. Fuck, his arm still looks terrible.

“The nearest town is thirty-five miles away,” Rumlow goes on. “The stores will be open in a couple of hours. I’ll tell you exactly what you need.”

No answer still, and now things are going from annoying to worrying: Rumlow needs the soldier to be able to go out today, needs him to be able to prove he’s trustworthy before Rumlow gets knocked out for surgery. He can’t trust the soldier to be alone with another ex-Hydra person if the idiot will barely talk to him.

Finally, when he’s about to get up and slap him, the soldier speaks. “I don’t need to wait until the shops are open,” he says.

“Yeah, you do.” Rumlow says, leaning back into the chair. “I don’t care if you can steal shit without getting caught. That’s still a robbery, and robbery means attention, and we are not drawing attention to this place, not when we gotta stick around for a while. Same reason you’re going out and not me. You gotta look normal.”

The soldier stares at him, still looking eerily ancient.

“Pretend to be a human for a few hours,” Rumlow prompts. “Think you can manage that?”

The soldier doesn’t answer, and that same unease is creeping back in now. It’s easy to forget what the soldier had been like last night, forget all the crying and capitulation, when he looks like this. It’s easy to start thinking about how much Rumlow's own chest still hurts, and about how easily the soldier could slip away once Rumlow sends him out of this house.

He doesn’t actually think the soldier would run deliberately—the guy doesn’t seem to have that in him, not with the way he’s acted so far. But he’s clearly still in a shitty mood about everything, and still confused, and he might just… wander off. Which would essentially be just as bad as him running away, because it’s not like Rumlow can just fuck off and track him down again, not with a valuable man tied up in the basement.

The soldier has stopped looking at him now, gazing off into the depths of the dim bedroom, and Rumlow takes a moment to consider potential solutions. He’d already been thinking about fucking the soldier—they have the free time until the stores open, for one, plus if the doctor fucks up this might be Rumlow’s last day on earth, so he might as well have fun. But he can always… expand on it. Teach the soldier a lesson, kill two birds with one stone.

He smiles, and he likes the way the soldier notices that even though he’s not looking at him, the way his gaze moves sharply back to Rumlow and then immediately lowers. The guy’s brain might still be mush, but he’s learning to read his owners again.

“We have some time to ourselves before you go,” Rumlow says, and then he keeps talking, and the soldier’s eyes unfocus a little as he speaks, staring past him again into nothing.

“Did you hear me, soldier?” he says when he's done.

The soldier nods. He is tense, shoulders hunched up, fingers of his left hand digging into the sheets.

“Then go do what I told you to do,” Rumlow says, and the soldier stands.

 

 

While the soldier is occupied, Rumlow goes downstairs to see the doctor again. He’s already gotten the list of things he needs off of him, so right now it’s just a matter of feeding him, and reminding him once again what will happen today if he screws up. That part’s always fun, at least. Then he makes himself some coffee—there’s still coffee in the house, even if the milk’s off—drinks it, grabs the stuff that he needs, and heads back to the guest bedroom.

The soldier is back there already, and standing by the edge of the bed. He doesn’t move as Rumlow approaches him: he just looks up in dull surprise when Rumlow tilts his head towards the bathroom.

Probably, he’d been hoping that Rumlow was going to fuck him in here. He is refusing to look at the stuff Rumlow is holding, so there’s clearly some denial going on. Rumlow can sense the confusion as the soldier follows him into the other room, even though it should be obvious what’s going to happen. He’d sent the soldier earlier into the bathroom off the main bedroom, which is where Rumlow had found a bunch of very useful medical gear while looking around yesterday. Some of it he is carrying right now.

“Lie down,” Rumlow tells him, flipping on the light.

The soldier looks down at the tiled floor like he’s forgotten where it’s located, then moves, dropping to his knees first and then easing himself down onto his back. He shudders a little as he does it: despite the good heating in the house, the floor must be cold. The bathroom is big enough that a six-foot man can lie down easily on the floor (and honestly, that just seems fucking wasteful), but sitting down next to him proves to be challenging, given how little Rumlow can bend his knee. He has to use some of the towels he’d also found yesterday for padding under one of his legs, but he makes it work. The drugs are doing their job.

He sets down the stuff he’s holding next to him, on the tiles. The soldier still isn’t looking at any of it, or at Rumlow: his eyes stay fixed stubbornly on the ceiling as Rumlow pulls a pair of black disposable nitrile gloves out of the little cardboard box he’d just put down. It takes longer than it usually would to get them on, and the whole time the soldier just studiously ignores him, like he thinks that if he tries hard enough Rumlow will forget he’s there.

When he’s done with the gloves, Rumlow taps the outside of the soldier’s bare thigh. “Spread your legs. Put one leg either side of me.”

He does it, silent and automatic despite the fact that he still won’t look at him, and Rumlow reaches for one of the other useful things he’d found during his deeper search yesterday: a bottle of lube.

He pumps some of it out onto his fingers, spreads the liquid out over the glove’s smooth surface, and the soldier finally twitches: he must be looking out of the corner of his eye. Rumlow shifts forward and taps his thigh again, the inside of it this time. “Spread your legs more,” he says. “Hold your dick up out of the way.”

And the soldier does it, inching his legs further apart and grabbing himself with his right hand.

It’s not a particularly attractive position, and the bright light overhead makes his skin look pale and sickly. But sitting up like this does give Rumlow a reasonably good view of the soldier’s face, and his face looks great: when Rumlow slides two fingers inside him he winces dramatically, squeezing his eyes shut and biting his lip.

… which is fucking ridiculous, considering how used to this the soldier should be by now.

Rumlow works the fingers out, and then in again, pushing more lube up inside him. “You cleaned yourself out like I told you?”

“Yes,” the soldier mumbles.

“Good,” he says. “Cos this hand’s going in there. All of it.”

He had been waiting to see the exact moment on the soldier’s face when the denial collapses and it finally sinks in what is going to happen. But it ends up unsatisfying— there’s a moment of something like disgust, but then his face just goes blank and grim, his jaw clenching. He just looks very tired.

Oh, well. They have a lot of time for it to get better.

He’d decided to do this for the sake of making the soldier less likely to run off, less likely to see himself as the type of person that could run off, or as any type of person, in fact. But now that they’re here—maybe there are other reasons, as well. Rumlow might die today. This might be the only chance he gets to get revenge on the soldier for fucking up Hydra, and for all the other shit he’s put him through since then.

He pushes another finger in, going slowly but not slowly enough. He could probably do this almost painlessly, if he was patient, if he was gentle, if he was cautious about making the soldier bleed. He isn’t any of those things. He can feel the soldier trying to let him in, and he’s actually doing a decent job of it: the soldier might not remember this being done to him before, but he sure does have a great muscle memory of large things being shoved inside him. It’s gross, really.

He pulls his fingers out long enough to add more lube, spread it over the glove. Waits for a moment, watches the soldier try to steady his breathing. Then pushes back in quickly, four fingers, and the soldier tenses and makes a miserable little noise that gets louder when Rumlow gets to the largest part of his knuckles. He’s squirming now, his metal arm making tiny clicking noises against the tiled floor. Rumlow’s hand is not small. The tight grip around his the base of his fingers is unbelievable.

“How does that feel?” he asks down at him, eyes on the soldier’s face.

The soldier is biting his lip, gaze fixed on the bright ceiling. He looks down at Rumlow, and this time the disgust is clear on his face.

He says: “How do you think it fucking feels?”

For fuck’s sake. This idiot just can’t fucking hold back, even though he must know he’s gonna pay for that later.

Or right now, why the hell not. Rumlow keeps his eyes on him, and then pushes forward with his hand, and keeps pushing, and finally the soldier’s dumb stoic act starts to break down: he hisses, arches his back off the floor. “No,” he says. “Wait. Wait. Wait, please—”

—and it happens, Rumlow’s hand slides all the way in, as the soldier makes a strangled sound like his lungs are being ripped apart.

Rumlow stops, breathing. It almost hurts, the soldier is so tight, the resistance at his entrance clamping down uselessly around Rumlow's wrist, stretched out absurdly. The soldier is barely moving, eyes wide and pale and fixed on the ceiling, his skin bright with a new layer of sweat. It’s a goddamn gift to see it.

Impulsively, he reaches out to touch the smooth skin of the soldier’s abdomen with his free hand, and then pushes, pressing down into the tight muscle. The soldier lets out a groan like he can’t believe it, and Rumlow can’t believe it either because even with the damaged nerves in that hand he can feel himself, feel his own hand in there from the outside.

“Fucking hell,” he says and the soldier moans again, sounding absolutely miserable. Which, he supposes, is not surprising.

“Jesus,” Rumlow goes on. He traces his fingers back and forth on the damp skin of the soldier’s stomach, firm, like he’s easing a cramp. “Hey, you gotta feel this.”

The soldier doesn’t answer, so Rumlow grabs his human hand from where it's still wrapped around his dick and guides it to the spot on his stomach where his own fingers had been. “Press down. Feel it?”

The soldier sniffs and then nods minutely, eyes still on the ceiling. Rumlow takes the opportunity to push his other hand in a bit further, still watching his face.

“No,” the soldier says.

“Shhhh.” Rumlow is far enough inside now that the edge of the glove has almost disappeared inside him.

“I’m going to throw up,” the soldier says. He doesn’t, though, just keeps complaining as Rumlow keeps moving his hand, gently, testing out angles. “Please. Please, why are you doing this. Please it’s not even good for you, please.” He stops, his face crumpling for a moment. “Just—just fuck me instead, commander, please.”

Rumlow doesn’t bother answering that. Begging is better than nothing, but it’s still too close to giving orders. “Touch yourself again,” he says. “Get yourself hard.”

The soldier shakes his head. He does move his hand back to his cock, almost like he doesn’t notice he’s doing it, but then he doesn’t move, doesn’t do anything at all until Rumlow twists his hand sharply inside him.

The soldier moans, back arching again, his left hand clenching into a fist. The pain seems to last longer than the movement does: the soldier keeps breathing hard after, tense in front of him and around his hand, riding it out like a cramp. Then slowly, defeatedly, he begins to move his hand up and down his own cock. He twitches a bit as he starts, closing his eyes.

Rumlow waits, and then waits some more, watching the soldier's hand moving over his still-mostly-soft dick. He had thought the internal pressure would be enough to make an erection easy for him, but he’d obviously underestimated the soldier’s bad mood.

“Seriously?” Rumlow says, finally.

“I can’t,” he spits out. “It hurts, I can’t, I—ahhhh—”

He’s not gentle enough when he pulls his hand out, hurts the soldier worse than he’d meant to, judging from the way his metal hand clenches into a fist again. Rumlow doesn’t keep him empty for long, moves two fingers back inside right away. Pushes forward with them, probing, and he can almost feel how grateful the soldier’s body is for the smaller intrusion, the way his ass spasms weakly around his fingers as Rumlow rubs at him with his fingertips. “That better?”

“Oh god,” the soldier says. “Not so hard—” Physically he might be acting relieved, but he still sounds and looks like an ungrateful little bitch.

“Shut up,” Rumlow says. “Keep going.”

The soldier resumes touching himself, and this time it works. Works in more ways than one, in fact: Rumlow can almost see the fight slowly leaching out of him as he finally gets hard: the stubborn blankness on his face fading away into something more urgent and more like fear. The soldier looks present now: he knows that this isn’t just being done to him anymore. He is participating in what is being done, like he always does. The sound of his hand moving on his dick is loud in the tiled room, like it's echoing every part of his shame, and Rumlow is hard as fuck right now but he keeps quiet, makes him do it alone.

The soldier twists a bit when he finally comes on Rumlow’s fingers, his moans turning all agonized, and in retrospect Rumlow is glad he hadn't kept his whole hand inside him, because the soldier clenches down so hard around him that he probably would have broken bone.

“That was a good one, huh?” Rumlow says.

The soldier doesn’t answer, but he does take a long time to come down from it, making little sad whining noises as his breath finally comes close to steadying out.

He looks—shiny is actually the first word that comes to mind, his body all wet with sweat under the bright lights, his own come a slick clear mess across his stomach, the glare from the ceiling reflecting off his arm and off the heavy layer of tears in his eyes. His skin is a deep pink color, the discoloration around his left shoulder flushed an angry red. He’s still breathing hard.

Rumlow starts to pull his fingers out, slowly, watches the soldier’s face carefully as he does it. The room is quiet apart from the soldier’s breathing, and the wet noise Rumlow's fingers make seems disgustingly loud. Rumlow pulls off the glove, tosses it away onto the tiles next to them. The soldier is not looking at him. He is not looking at anything, and Rumlow is so hard in his pants it’s almost painful.

“Who do you belong to?” he says. He asks it gently, his newly-bare hand stroking the outside of the soldier’s thigh, which is trembling a little, twitching in fasciculation.

The soldier swallows, licks his lips. It takes him a few times to start talking. “I—” he says. “I used to belong to Hydra and now I belong to you.” He recites it, like a memorized pledge, spilling out quickly like a password. “Please.” He swallows again. “Please—”

“Shut up,” Rumlow says, and pinches down hard. “Did you even understand what you just told me? Does anything actually make it into that broken fucking brain?”

He nods, and the movement shakes some tears loose, sliding over the wet skin on his face. “I—I need to—I can't—”

“Shut up,” Rumlow says again, and this time he moves his hand, pinches his inner thigh. It works better: the soldier whines, and has to restrain himself from moving. “Who decides when this is over?”

The soldier’s voice is so weak, he can barely hear it. “You do.”

“Who?” The skin under his fingers is so soft, delicate even, and Rumlow twists it between his fingers. “More polite this time.”

“You do, sir. Commander. Please.”

“Again.”

“Y-you do.”

Rumlow lets go of the little darkened patch of skin, rubs at it gently. There’s the sound of quiet crying, and maybe this is already enough, but the soldier had been like this last night and it hadn’t stuck then. Rumlow settles back, moves his hand over himself through his pants, just enough to take the edge off so he can keep going. Then he shifts his position, pushing the soldier’s legs further apart. The soldier doesn’t resist, just lies spread out in front of him, lets him look. He's so still that it reminds Rumlow of the CPR dummies he had worked with back in training, the ones made of plastic that you breathe into. Maybe the soldier had been used for something like this before, by an entirely different variety of sick fucks. Maybe he had been used as an anatomical model. Maybe they’d used him for surgery practice. It’s fucking gross to think about it, but it also makes him harder, he’s not going to lie about that.

He pinches the soldier’s inner thigh again, a new spot of skin this time, and the soldier gasps. Next to Rumlow’s hand, his ass is still stretched open from the width of Rumlow's fist, his wrist: all swollen inside and outside, sloppy with lube. Lube is smeared all over the tiles beneath him, too. It doesn’t look sexy. It looks fucking ridiculous, honestly, and that just makes Rumlow want to take a picture and show it to him later. See how arrogant the soldier gets when Rumlow reminds him that he’d laid there and let him do this.

Rumlow pinches again, harder, and the soldier makes a noise in the back of his throat, but otherwise keeps quiet—he's entirely given up on the begging, and that’s good, but Rumlow still keeps at it for a while, probing and twisting, working at the smooth damp skin with all the strength of his good hand, until the soldier is moving constantly, squirming, arching, rocking back and forth, all without getting anywhere, an insect trapped and pinned while a child pulls its legs off, one by one.

“Who do you belong to?” Rumlow asks again. He takes up a new piece of skin between his thumb and his forefinger.

It takes the soldier a moment to collect his breathing. “You. You, sir, only you.”

“What are you going to do today?”

“Whatever you want me to—oh god, please.” Rumlow’s digging in deep with his nails, pushing into the bruise he's made.

“Whatever I want, forever. Forever.”

“Yes—yess—”

“What do you want now? Do you want my hand back inside you?”

The soldier sobs. Rumlow sees a small flash of resistance there again, sees it in the way he won’t answer at first, the way he clenches his teeth and grimaces. It’s beautiful, even if it doesn’t last. And it’s more beautiful when the soldier just settles down, inhales, self-hatred settling over his face like a sheet of ice.

“If you—” he says, “if you want it—”

“Yeah,” Rumlow says, “I think I do.”

 

 

By the end of it all, the soldier is so wrecked and disgusting down there that Rumlow doesn’t even attempt to fuck him: he just gets the soldier to sit up in front of him and jerks off on his face. The soldier doesn’t do a good job of pretending to be eager about it, but he does hold still, and opens his mouth when Rumlow tells him to. He stays still afterwards, too, even after Rumlow has stood up and done up his pants and washed his hands at the sink.

“You can move now,” Rumlow says down at him. “Do whatever you gotta do.”

“I feel sick,” the soldier says.

Usually Rumlow might make fun of that, but the soldier actually looks pretty terrible, more terrible than he’d expect even, all pale and out of it, his shoulder a mess. There’s quite a bit of blood on the tiles near where he is kneeling, smeared out and mixed in with the lube.

“You need me to help?” Rumlow asks it without mockery, and waits for the gentle tone to sink into the soldier’s brain.

The soldier pauses, but apparently there’s no pride left in him, not for the moment at least: he nods.

And it’s the gentleness that always breaks him, so Rumlow does it.

He cleans him off, leading him into the bathtub so that the soldier doesn’t have to stand up. Just rinses him off first, and then actually fills the tub. Or tries to fill it, anyway: the soldier reaches out and silently turns off the faucet when the water starts getting deep enough to cover him.

“You’re no good at this,” Rumlow says, but he lets it go, and the soldier seems content sitting there in five inches of water, and so Rumlow just finishes washing him as best he can with his limited movement, and combs out the worst of the knots from his hair with the fingers of his good hand.

Afterwards, on a whim, he fetches shaving gear from the other bathroom and shaves the soldier’s face. He pats his face and neck down with a hand towel afterwards, pushes his hair back behind his ears. When he’s done the soldier looks less like someone you’d avoid on sight, and almost like a normal human. Well, not really, but he could pass for it.

The soldier is still silent, but he doesn’t look like he’s been crying anymore, and his face is strangely peaceful now, as relaxed and placid as a dead man’s. He leans against Rumlow when Rumlow lets them both lie on the bed for a while, getting his shoulder all damp from his wet hair. He looks, oddly, the closest he has seen the soldier come to being happy.

 

 

 

Chapter 8

Rumlow’s not nervous while the soldier is out of the house: nervousness is for people who aren’t able to deal with all of the potential consequences of a situation. But if Rumlow was that type of person, then yeah, he might be nervous.

In any case, it turns out not to be necessary. The soldier returns in the late afternoon, and Rumlow pretends that he hadn’t been lurking near the door with a gun, and waits for the soldier to let himself in.

The soldier pushes open the front door, and then drops several heavy-looking bags on the tiled floor of the entranceway. Several of them make a distinctive metal clinking sound. He looks up at Rumlow, and just stares at him, rubbing at his left shoulder like it’s sore.

“Hi, honey,” Rumlow says, settling his handgun into the holster at his belt. “How was your day?”

The soldier glares at him and doesn’t reply. Despite his clean-shaven face and general lack of filthiness, he still looks like someone a normal person would cross the street to avoid. Hell, even Rumlow might avoid him, if he didn’t know better.

“You hungry?” Rumlow says instead. “We can eat before we go get the doctor from downstairs.”

He still doesn’t answer, but he does follow Rumlow deeper into the house after Rumlow turns away. His boots leave a trail of filthy slush over the doctor’s fancy tiled floor. The snow on the ground outside has melted into mud.

 

 

Reyner insists on setting things up in the big home-office room on the second floor, since it’s well-lit and has a big desk that Rumlow can lie down on during the surgery. Potentially dying while lying on a wooden executive’s desk seems like an especially shitty metaphor, but it’s better than being cut open on the bathroom floor or something, so Rumlow agrees.

“All right, soldier,” he says as he sits down on the edge of the desk. “If our doctor friend here messes up, kills me—fucks up in any way—you are gonna skin him alive. You got that?”

The soldier is standing nearby: he’s been hovering close to Rumlow almost since he got back, just like he used to. He nods. From off to the side, where the doctor is setting up the collapsible IV pole, Rumlow hears a muffled coughing sound.

“Do it slow,” Rumlow adds. “Don’t kill him quick. Make it last.”

The soldier nods again. He’s doing a good job of looking terrifying, but Rumlow knows he’s lying. The soldier is a blunt instrument, not a torturer. Even in his current, reasonably compliant state, he’ll probably just smash the doctor’s head against the floor to get things over with. If he kills him at all. 

The doctor doesn’t know any of that, though.

“Okay,” Reyner says. His voice is shaky. “I—I can’t actually knock you out safely before we start on the contractures. But we can try—” he stops, and then starts again, stuttering: “—before we start, I can give you—”

“Christ, don’t fucking tell me about it. Just do it.”

The doctor nods. It takes him a moment to get a hold of himself, but then he sucks in a deep breath and says: “You’ll, uh, need to lie down.”

Rumlow eases himself onto his back, onto the polished-wood expanse of the empty desk. There’s recessed lighting in the high ceiling, turned up bright, and he tries to focus on that, on how fucking dumb it is to stick so many lights high up in your ceiling when you’d need a ladder every time a bulb went out. Keeps his mind on that as the needle goes into his arm.

Whatever the doctor gives him, it isn’t as pleasant as the pills Rumlow has been taking: as the drug spreads through him he just feels shaky and heavy all over, his senses all mashed up like someone’s hit him. The doctor’s voice is far away above him, sounding unsteady and almost childlike, as he instructs the soldier on what to do. The doctor sounds both scared and helpless, like he’s not expecting to be obeyed, and then his voice shifts to a tone of surprise:, the soldier is following the instructions he’s been given.

Rumlow tunes all of that out, looks back at the ceiling. More sounds, people moving back and forth, more of the doctor’s shaky voice. Out of the corner of his eye he sees the soldier—despite the drugs, there’s some instinct remaining to not take his eyes off the soldier for too long—putting on a pair of sterile surgical gloves. Rumlow smiles, both because he’s quite high by now and because it just seems ridiculous, putting a thin glove over that metal hand. The soldier’s head is down; he’s hunched over a little, and then the doctor’s scared-animal-handler voice squeaks out a command and the soldier moves closer to the big wooden desk, blocking out the lights.

He leans over Rumlow, from the side, across his chest, the weight sudden and heavy, his skin still smelling like soap, his right forearm firm and steady near Rumlow’s neck, the heat of the soldier’s skin bleeding through his clothes. His metal hand, covered in that thin layer of nitrile rubber, moves to coil around the wrist of Rumlow bad hand, holding it still. Pinning him.

The soldier holds him down, and he keeps holding him down the whole time the doctor works, and nothing Rumlow does matters after that. It doesn’t matter if he focuses on the ceiling or not, or if he tries to go away to a happy place. It doesn't matter that there is a sick feeling of familiarity to it that he feels down in his bones. It doesn’t matter; he is pinned by metal and he can’t move, and so after a while he stops trying, and just lets his eyes rest on what he can see, on the bulk of the soldier’s body above him and the vague form of the doctor beyond him.

He can’t see his own hand; the soldier’s body is blocking it, but he can feel it. Against Rumlow’s wrist, the nitrile glove on the soldier’s metal hand has gotten all slick and wet with blood.

 

 

Either the doctor had given him something not entirely useless, or Rumlow’s body had just finally given out, because when he comes to in the bed in the spare bedroom, he doesn’t remembering getting there. He is cold all over, still heavy from the drugs. He hurts like he’s been torn open.

But he’s alive.

The room is silent like he is alone, and mostly dark. Rumlow turns his head—he can do that much. Curtains mostly closed, a little bit of light coming in: late afternoon. He can see furniture, the dark TV across the room by the door, an IV pole standing by the bed. And—

“Fuck,” Rumlow says out loud. The soldier is sitting there in that stupid fucking pink armchair, and has apparently he has just been sitting there staring at Rumlow this whole time. “You’re a goddamn creepy fucker, you know that?”

The soldier doesn’t reply.

Rumlow groans. Just talking hurts, somehow. The pain is mostly in his hand and his leg, but any movement at all seems to make it worse. “Where’s the doc? He still alive?”

“Downstairs,” the soldier says from where he’s sitting on the stupid chair. “He said that it went well. Should I go get him now?”

“No,” Rumlow says. He’d probably just want to hit him at this point. “Just get me some water.”

“You are already getting fluids,” the soldier says, tilting his head toward the IV pole, like Rumlow can’t see it.

Rumlow sighs, which also hurts. “Get me some water. Now.”

The soldier pauses for a second, like it takes that long to decide to stop being a little bitch, and then stands up. A moment later, the light in the bathroom switches on.

He’s got a glass of water in his human hand when he returns to the bedside, and then without any warning he moves closer, one knee on the bed tilting down the mattress. Rumlow flinches, and hates himself for it. The soldier still smells a little of blood, or maybe that’s just the new bandages Rumlow is wrapped in.

The soldier slips his metal hand between the pillow and the back of Rumlow’s head, lifting his head up so he can drink and pressing the cold glass against his mouth.

Rumlow closes his eyes, and drinks, and pretends that he is not there.

 

 

The doctor is back, at some point, later in the night. The IV is removed, and there’s an excruciating trip to the bathroom that Rumlow is willing to forget as soon as possible. Then sleep, the type of fractured sleep where you can’t move without waking yourself up from the pain. He’s had a lot of that lately, but this is worse.

There’s dreams, as well, even more fucked-up than usual, and after what seems like a long time the dreams are interrupted by a voice nearby.

Rumlow opens his eyes. He’s on the bed, lying on his back, and it’s a minute before he figures out that the voice wasn’t part of one of the dreams, and that the person that had spoken is, unlike anyone else in the dream, actually still alive.

The soldier is close to the bed. It’s darker now, just light enough to see the outline of his body. Rumlow is under blankets, but he already feels cold all over, colder when the blankets are lifted up and the soldier crawls into the bed next to him.

The soldier reaches his human arm across Rumlow’s chest, gentle, avoiding the parts of him that are bandaged and hurting, and huddles in close.

His skin is ridiculously warm, the difference in temperature so sudden it makes him shudder. The soldier is not pleasant to lie next to: too much metal, too bony after the weight he’s lost. But the warmth is nice, like a human-shaped space heater. The pain is like ice in his skin and his muscles; the feeling of warm skin is a distraction.

He lies still, and the soldier moves closer, still carefully avoiding the areas that the doctor had sliced up, adjusting the blanket back over them when it falls down far enough to expose skin. He seems to be trying to press as much of himself against Rumlow as possible, and then the human arm that had been resting near Rumlow’s shoulder moves up, touching his hair.

“Shh,” the soldier says softly, his fingers stroking through his hair. His head is near Rumlow’s neck; Rumlow can feel his breath. "Shhh."

“Shut up,” Rumlow says.

The soldier does, but he keeps moving his hand, stroking Rumlow’s head like he’s a fucking dog, but then again everything is still warm and his brain is a wreck and so he lies there in the darkness of the blankets around them and the smell of the soap on the soldier’s skin, and then the soldier moves in even closer, snuggling up and nuzzling at his neck like a hungry cat, and—

…that’s enough, honestly.

Rumlow’s right elbow is uninjured: he draws his arm back and then shoves it, hard, into the soldier’s ribs.

The soldier hisses, drawing back with a rush of new cold air on Rumlow’s skin. He's sitting up, looking down at Rumlow, glaring.

“I am still in charge here,” Rumlow says. “Do not touch me without permission. Understand?”

The soldier keeps glaring: even in the limited light Rumlow can see that he’s showing his teeth. But he nods.

“You can lie in the bed,” Rumlow says. “But no more touching or petting me or any of that shit, or we’re gonna have to teach you another lesson. Got that?”

The soldier nods again.

Rumlow closes his eyes, trying to readjust enough to get slightly less uncomfortable. Next to him, he feels the soldier lie down in a way that seems heavier and more dramatic than usual, like he’s sulking. Rumlow ignores him, and the soldier keeps still, lying next to him like a dead weight on the mattress.

It’s still enough to keep him warm, though.

 

 

“Get me some food,” Rumlow says to him the next morning, after the doctor has finished another torture session and has been taken back downstairs.

The soldier leaves the room; several minutes later he returns with a protein bar from the kitchen. He sets it down on the blankets next to Rumlow.

“That’s it? I thought you got more food yesterday.”

The soldier looks at him blankly.

“Ok, whatever. Just open it for me.”

The soldier does, and Rumlow eats. The soldier sits down in the armchair again, and stares at him, but Rumlow’s latest round of drugs are starting to kick in and he doesn’t care. It’s raining outside, lightly, and that’s all he can hear when he closes his eyes: the soldier is back in his chair, watching him in absolute silence.

At lunch time, the soldier brings him another bar. He sets it down on the sheets.

“Seriously? I know I told you to get ramen. You can make fucking ramen, right?”

The soldier stares. “No,” he says finally.

“It's got instructions written on the packet, soldier.”

Nothing.

“You've brought down governments before.”

More staring.

“Okay. Fine. Open the fucking wrapper for me.”

The soldier does. In the evening, he brings him a slightly different flavor of protein bar.

 

 

“You need to change these sheets,” Rumlow says the next day. He can sit up now, a little, but that’s about it as far as improvement goes. “I’ve been bleeding all over them.”

“I don’t know how to do that,” the soldier says.

“You don’t have to wash them, soldier. Just go grab some new sheets, we’ll go from there.”

“I don’t know where they are.”

Rumlow looks up at him carefully. His head is less fuzzy this morning, and he should be able to figure out if the soldier is fucking with him.

The soldier stares back at him, silent. His face is set in its usual expression of sullen blankness. He doesn’t look like he’s trying to be any more annoying than usual.

He has never actually had to take care of himself, Rumlow figures, has never had to solve problems that aren’t related to tracking down someone and killing them. Maybe he really doesn’t know how to boil water for ramen or find a linen closet.

He can give him the benefit of the doubt, for now.

“You’ve at least been feeding the doctor, right?” he says.

The soldier nods.

“Fine. Whatever. Bring me the remote for that fucking TV.”

 

 

 

Chapter 9

 

“It’s all healing up very well,” Reyner says as he starts wrapping the gauze around Rumlow’s hand again. Rumlow’s sitting up on the edge of the bed where he’s spent the greater part of the last week. Most of his clothes are on the floor beside him, next to a small pile of the trash that’s built up.

“I’d still give it another week before you can use the hand again,” the doctor goes on, “and we’ll need to keep up the exercises we’ve been doing. But you’re on the right track.”

“Then what do I need you around for?” Rumlow says.

The doctor’s eyes go wide, the bandage slipping in his fingers. He starts to stutter something about more routines and physical rehabilitation.

“Relax,” Rumlow says. “I’m just fucking with you.”

The doctor stops stuttering, and regains his grip on the bandage, but he doesn’t actually look that relieved. Of course, this man wouldn’t have made it through medical school if he was a complete idiot, and only a complete idiot would believe that Rumlow actually planned on keeping him alive once he’s done with him.

No, Reyner knows he’s a walking ghost: he’s just not man enough to admit it to himself.

Rumlow does not have that problem. He’s good at recognizing when things are going to shit—he would not have been able to survive as long as he did in his career otherwise. Which is why he is capable of admitting what, exactly, has been going on in the week since the doctor sliced him open:

The soldier is fucking with him.

Rumlow glances over at him now: the soldier is standing near the end of the bed, close enough to intervene in the unlikely event that the doctor tries something. His face is blank. He looks like he’s focusing on the situation intently, but without any real understanding of what’s going on, like a guard dog.

It’s a reasonably good act.

 

 

Rumlow is able to get out of bed these days, even get downstairs to the kitchen if he takes his time and the soldier helps him. He’s done it a lot, as well, driven less by a desire to move around and heal than he is by a desire to eat something other than the cold instant food the soldier brings him. Now that he’s slightly more lucid and in less pain—not to mention hungrier— he can appreciate all the rich-people condiments that Reyner has left in his stupid house: truffle oil and saffron and six different varieties of salt all in slightly different colors. Rumlow cooks a few times in the evening, keeping things simple and taking breaks. The first time, after he and the soldier ate, he had told the soldier to clean up.

“I don’t know how,” the soldier had said.

“You don’t know how a dishwasher works?”

“No.”

“What about water? They ever fucking teach you about water at Hydra?”

The soldier had said nothing, had just sat silently and given him that slightly vacant stare.

Eventually Rumlow had given up on the idea of a less-disgusting cooking area, and had just told him to at least move the goddamn overflowing trash from the pantry to outside, and he had been been genuinely surprised when the soldier had done that without requiring step-by-step instructions.

He hadn’t pushed it further afterwards: the soldier really is an idiot, after all, and surely his most recent round of injury and sickness has made it worse. That’s enough to explain his incompetence. Probably.

But then Rumlow had started to notice the other stuff.

Like the fact that the soldier has managed to reinstate the property’s local alarm system, and that he’s rearranged sections of furniture on the first floor to allow easier routes to the main exits. He has consistently kept the new snow and ice cleared from around the vehicles and the exit routes he’s planned. The trash that Rumlow had gotten him to take outside had ended up carefully buried. The soldier has even brought in the doctor’s mail, for fuck’s sake, even if he’d then just strewn it all over a corner of the dining room. And that’s just the shit he hasn’t been able to hide.

The soldier is, apparently, still perfectly capable of doing whatever he thinks is necessary to avoid them being detected here and facilitate possible escape. His brain is working just fine—as well as it had ever worked before, anyway. The not-knowing-how-to-heat-up-food-or-clean thing is all an act.

The soldier is just being a piece of shit.

Still, part of handling the soldier is knowing what issues are worth spending your energy on, and for now at least the soldier still seems to recognize his own limits. He still largely does what Rumlow tells him to. He has kept the doctor under control.

And, no matter how annoying and bitchy he gets during the day, he still crawls into bed with Rumlow every night, waits for permission to touch him. Rumlow doesn’t usually let him get too close, just allows the soldier to hold onto his arm, maybe curl up against him, but the soldier still acts like he is freezing to death and Rumlow is the only source of heat in the universe. It’d be touching if it wasn’t so pathetic.

So Rumlow tolerates the other stuff. He figures he’ll slap the soldier around a bit when he’s feeling up to it, mess around with him for a while until the soldier feels ready to apologize. But for now, it’s not worth the effort.

At least, that’s what he thinks until one day in the late afternoon when he goes down into the basement to check on the doctor.

 

 

“You brought him books?” Rumlow says.

The soldier is standing by the sink: he gives Rumlow the same dumb stare he’s been giving him for a week.

“Fucking books?” Rumlow repeats.

“He asked me to bring them,” the soldier says.

Rumlow steadies himself against the sink cabinet with his good hand, and looks at the shitshow in front of him, from the edge of the bathtub where Reyner is sitting right now, to the tiled floor where the doctor has been sleeping. The soldier has brought in cushions and sheets and pillows, enough for the doctor to set up a makeshift bed next to the bath. Some of that bedding must have come from the linen closet; clearly, the soldier had figured out where the fucking linen closet was after all. He’s redone Reyner’s restraints as well, attaching the doctor’s ankle to the pipe using what looks like several interlocking bike locks, so that he can move around the room. There are stacks of clothes folded up on a shelf, next to the spare towels. And then there’s the books—piles of them, on the floor and the edge of the tub, magazines and journals as well, apparently brought in from all over the house.

Reyner stares up at him: he’s been silent since Rumlow came in, and he looks pale and terrified, but apart from that? He appears remarkably well taken care of. Not only has the soldier been fucking with Rumlow, he’s been doing it while treating the man they are supposed to be keeping prisoner—the fucking random Hydra guy who the soldier did not even fucking recognize—like a valued guest.

Rumlow turns away, keeping his expression neutral. Losing his shit in front of the doctor would be counterproductive. “Come with me,” he says to the soldier. “Now.”

The soldier doesn’t protest: he silently follows Rumlow out of the crowded and towards the stairs leading up to the first floor. He even tries to take Rumlow’s arm to help him up the stairs, and Rumlow shakes him off, even though that means he has to go up slowly, one step at a time. Does the soldier even realize he’s in trouble? Does he realize anything? It’s fucking infuriating, having to deal with this thing.

In the kitchen, Rumlow avoids the maze of trash that has accumulated on the floor, shoves several empty food packages away so he can lean against the counter. He turns to face the soldier, who is still following him. He says: “Do you think I’m as dumb as you are, soldier?”

The soldier stares at him.

“Did you think I wouldn’t notice?” He keeps his voice calm. “You think I wouldn’t go down there and see that you’ve set up a little slumber party?”

“I didn’t let the doctor go,” the soldier says finally. “I did what you said.”

“You know, you’re really fucking useless, even for an assassin that doesn’t kill people.”

“I did everything that you—”

“Shut the fuck up.” The calm isn’t working anymore. “That’s not enough and you know it. Jesus, do you want to be punished, is that it? That what you want?”

No answer. That blank stare is gone: there’s an edge of active defiance on his face now, like he actually wants an argument. He straightens up slightly, shifting his posture.

“Answer me, soldier. What the fuck are you trying to achieve with this behavior?”

And then it happens: the sudden anger hits the soldier like a gunshot, so loud and abrupt that Rumlow actually flinches back.

“Fuck you!” the soldier bursts out. “I hate you! You fucking asshole.”

Rumlow stays still, keeps his grip strong on the counter behind him. In front of him the soldier is breathing hard, his face twisted. “You’re fucking awful,” he spits out. “You always were. I don’t want to be here. I hate you. I—”

And then the soldier stops, cuts off, like he’s run up against some internal wall, like his brain has just finally caught up with him.

Rumlow waits.

He’s almost surprised to find that after his initial surprise, he’s not actually afraid. The soldier has proved by now, again and again, that he will not seriously hurt Rumlow, no matter how much he yells and complains. And if he wanted to—if things really were different this time—Rumlow would already be dead.

So he just gives it a few seconds, pretends his heartrate hadn’t changed at all, and then says: “You done?”

The soldier looks back at him. He is almost shaking in anger now, but his eyes are agonized: he looks so frustrated it’s almost pathetic, like he can’t speak at all.

Rumlow goes on, letting go of the counter now. He keeps his voice calm again, steady. “I think you know that what you did down there was wrong, don’t you soldier? Helping the doctor that much. And all the other shit. You knew this wasn’t what I wanted from you.”

The soldier looks down, eyes on the filthy kitchen floor between them. His hands are in fists; the human one is still visibly shaking.

“Soldier. I asked you a question. Did you know what you did was wrong?”

The soldier nods, a tiny dip of his chin.

Rumlow doesn’t know if that’s the truth, or if it’s just the answer he thinks Rumlow will accept, but he slaps him anyway.

It’s not that hard of a blow, more for the sake of an insult than causing pain, and the soldier takes it silently, his eyes going unfocused as he absorbs the impact. It’s only then, watching that happen, that Rumlow realizes how angry he is. He had been wrong; he hadn’t had the control over the situation he thought he had all week, had not even predicted the soldier’s tantrum just now. He’s angry at himself, and he’s angry at the soldier for causing all that shit, after all the other shit that he has done…

Rumlow definitely needs to nip this bullshit in the bud, and it needs to be thorough. The soldier is not going to have a good evening.

The soldier is still silent, staring past Rumlow as if he’s fascinated with the trash all over the counter behind him. His eyes are narrowed, the left side of his face turning a faint red from the blow.

Rumlow lets him wait, and then lets him wait more, and after a second the soldier’s eyes move to him, briefly, like he’s checking what Rumlow wants him to do next.

The soldier has always done that to superiors, and sometimes it’s actually nice to see it, like a power trip. Now it just makes Rumlow want to slap him again.

But he doesn’t: instead, he just leans back, grasping the counter again, and just looks him over. Quiet, drawing it out, appreciating the tension in the soldier’s shoulders, the tightness in his jaw. The big house is silent around them, so silent, like they’re in their own world. Rumlow knows what he’s going to do already, and it’s hard not to smile about it.

Finally he speaks, quiet: “Get down on your knees.”

The soldier just looks at him for half a second, and then does it, dropping to his knees on the filthy vinyl of the kitchen floor in front of him.

“Okay, soldier,” he says, friendly now. “For a start, we’re gonna clean up some of this mess. All right?”

The soldier looks up at him again, this time in surprise. He’d clearly been expecting something else—most of the people throughout his life who had ordered him to drop to his knees probably weren’t very creative about what they’d wanted him to do next.

So it takes a while for it to penetrate into his head what it is that Rumlow actually wants: he stares up at him like a computer that’s running too slowly.

Rumlow kicks at a piece of food near his foot—it looks like a piece of food, anyway, but it’s so old and discolored it’s unidentifiable, just a light-brownish lump that has probably been there for weeks. He uses the toe of his boot to push it across the vinyl closer to where the soldier is kneeling.

The soldier looks up at him for a moment more, then down at the floor. Finally, he reaches out with his metal hand to pick the piece of trash up. Rumlow makes a disapproving noise, and kicks the soldier’s hand away.

The soldier hisses in surprise, glares up at him again.

“No,” Rumlow says down at him. He likes how loud his voice is in the silence of the house, how fixated the soldier is on his face, so confused and stupid.

“You’re a dog, soldier,” he goes on. “Clean it up like a dog.”

The soldier’s expression is priceless. First the dawning realization, and then he’s suddenly so angry again that he’s baring his teeth, his skin flushing deep red. He looks both shocked and utterly disgusted. He understands completely what Rumlow is telling him to do, and it’s already killing him.

But he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t argue. Instead, he just gradually drops his head down. For a moment he just stares at the floor in front of him, breathing deeply. The fingers of his metal hand flex, form into a fist, relax.

Then, slowly, the soldier drops onto all fours, and bends down further and picks up the disgusting piece of old food with his mouth.

Rumlow can’t help but smile now: he already feels better. “Good boy,” he says. “Now, let’s take it to the trash.”

The soldier, despite all of his faults, is relatively quick at catching on when it comes to this kind of thing: he doesn’t attempt to stand up. Instead he crawls, slow, his hair hanging in his face, over to the pantry at the side of the kitchen. The door is open, and the trashcan inside is still almost empty, the lid lying next to it on the floor. When the soldier reaches the bin, he raises his head slightly to get to the right height, and then drops the food inside. He pauses, takes a long deep breath and then exhales like he’s steadying himself. He seems surprised, almost, about the fact that he’s following Rumlow’s orders—as if they didn’t both know that it was going to happen from the start. As if anything else he did could be anything other than a behavioral glitch.

“Good job,” Rumlow says, and then gestures, still friendly. “There’s a lot more over here.”

The soldier turns around, still on all fours. He’s glaring like he wants to kill somebody, but Rumlow has seen enough of the soldier’s recent moods to know that all of that anger is aimed internally, and that—that just makes everything better. The soldier is perfectly aware of what he is doing, aware that he is not being forced to do it, not physically. Knows, on some level, that this is all his own weakness. Somehow, his own pride is still eating at him—and where the fuck does that pride even come from, after everything that’s been done to him?

It’s incredible to watch.

“Good boy,” Rumlow says again when the soldier reaches the spot he’s pointing to. The soldier bends forward slowly to pick up another piece of trash in his mouth—this one looks like an old piece of bread crust—and when he straightens up and is close enough, Rumlow reaches out to pet at his head.

The soldier flinches, and lets out a little breath, but doesn’t shy away from it, stays still and lets him touch him. He’s staring at the floor, letting his hair fall over his face.

“You’re just really stupid, aren’t you?” Rumlow says. He strokes the soldier’s hair back, cups his hand gently over the back of his head. The soldier is sweating a little bit. “You’re worse than a pet. It was dumb of me to leave you in charge of anyone.”

No response.

“We’ll have some fun after this, after you clean up, and maybe you’ll learn better, all right? We just gotta keep teaching you until you can listen to me.”

He feels the movement under his hand as the soldier nods.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 10

“Go wash up. You’re filthy,” Rumlow tells the soldier, and then after he's left the room and gone upstairs Rumlow stops by at the little alcove off the living room that holds the doctor’s liquor collection.

The remains of it, anyway: Reyner had apparently spent his time alone in the house finishing off most of the alcohol in his possession, and the best Rumlow can find now is a dusty bottle of peach vodka. He grabs it and takes a drink: it’s not quite as disgusting as he’d imagined.

The soldier still is not back, and Rumlow waits, taking another drink. It’s dark in the room, and he turns on the main light in the living room. Then he notices the soldier’s backpack, propped up against the wall, almost hidden behind an armchair that’s been shoved off to one side near the front entrance.

Rumlow picks up the bag and unzips it: clothes, tools, documents. The stupid picture of Steve Rogers is back in there, too; maybe the soldier has been jerking off to it or something. From what he can see, the soldier hasn’t put anything in the bag that hadn’t been in there before. But obviously, the fact that he’s packed it back up is not a good sign.

It’s not a good sign that he is still taking so long, either.

Rumlow pushes the picture back inside the backpack, drops the bag, then turns around and—

“Jesus,” he says out loud, because of course the soldier is right there and had arrived in the room without making a fucking sound. “You’re a creepy fucker, you know that?”

The soldier doesn’t answer, just stands there with his usual irritatingly sulky expression. If he had noticed that Rumlow had the backpack, he doesn’t show it. His hair is wet, like he’d taken a shower upstairs, even though Rumlow had only told him to wash up.

And of course if Rumlow brings that up, or if he asks him about the backpack, the soldier will just pretend he doesn’t understand.

God, no wonder Pierce had disliked him so much. Rumlow had always figured it was just because of the being friends with Captain America bullshit. But maybe it was also because Pierce had just known the guy for a lot longer, and had had time to notice just how infuriating he is.

For god’s sake, Rumlow is supposed to be good at dealing with the soldier. Always had been. And yet, almost since he got here, the soldier has been fucking with him. Has made him uncertain; just now, Rumlow had almost worried that the soldier had fucked off; it was like he was not even—

“Follow me,” Rumlow says, to cut off the thought.

The soldier follows, trailing him across the rearranged, too-big living room. When Rumlow sits down on the giant sofa that runs along half the length of the room the soldier pauses in front of him, still standing.

Rumlow takes another drink from the bottle of vodka he's holding. He doesn’t speak for a long moment, because the soldier looks uncomfortable now and Rumlow wants to draw it out. The soldier is standing on the edge of the plush, expensive-looking—if dirty—rug that covers most of the living room floor, and he looks so stupidly out of place, surrounded by a matching sofa set and coordinated throw pillows, that Rumlow would laugh if he wasn’t in the mood to kill him.

Instead, he beckons with his chin. “C’mere. Kneel down.”

It takes a few moments too long, but the soldier obeys, getting down onto his knees on the rug. He shuffles forward, straightens up to kneel directly in front of where Rumlow is sitting. He looks up at him, his expression sullen.

“I think you still don’t understand what’s going on here,” Rumlow says. “I haven’t been treating you nice because you deserve treating nice. I haven’t done it because you’ve been good. Why have I been doing it, soldier?”

The soldier doesn’t answer, glares at him without moving. His wet hair is dripping water onto his neck.

“Because I am good to you,” Rumlow says. “And you’ve been taking advantage of that, haven’t you?”

He still doesn’t answer. The soldier has never been particularly smart about self-preservation, but now it seems like he actively wants to get punched.

Rumlow takes another drink, sets the bottle down on the floor next to the couch. He reaches out to where the soldier is kneeling in front of him, and despite all the glaring he’s been doing the soldier holds still and doesn’t shrink back from him. He keeps holding still as Rumlow fits his good hand, firm and tight, around the soldier’s exposed neck.

 

 

Rumlow has done this enough before to know that it’d be far less painful if he focused on the sides of the soldier’s neck, on cutting off the blood flow through the arteries on either side of his throat. This time, he doesn’t do that. He presses down right at the front, so that he is putting all of the pressure on the soldier’s windpipe, squeezing hard but not hard enough to make the soldier pass out, not yet. He’s not sure he can make the soldier pass out, not with one hand anyway, but that’s not the point. The point is making it hurt.

And it works. The soldier is hurting.

He is kneeling on that thick rug, his face flushed a deep red, his eyes open and still glaring and he is just—staying still, taking it. Just looking at how miserable the soldier is getting already makes him want to come in his pants.

“That’s good,” Rumlow says, and pushes down harder against the skin of his neck with his good hand, until the soldier starts to sag a little under his grip, his eyes going fuzzy and dull. And then after a moment Rumlow lets go, and the soldier falls forward. He is gasping, steadying himself with his right hand against Rumlow’s knee. He makes a lot of undignified noises as he tries to get air back into his lungs. Not unconscious, though.

Rumlow lets him do it for a moment, and then pushes the soldier away so he can reach down to get the bottle of vodka again. The soldier stays upright, steadying himself against the floor with one hand. When Rumlow is done taking a drink he sets down the bottle, reaches out again to grab the soldier’s neck.

“No,” the soldier says. His voice is raspy, weak. 

“C’mon. You had your break.” Rumlow says, and the soldier flinches, and then tries to hide it, which is funny. He still does not struggle.

The next time when Rumlow lets go, the soldier is swaying, and almost falls.

“You okay?” Rumlow asks. “You need a drink of water or something?”

The soldier doesn’t answer. His human hand is pressed against his throat like that’ll help. The skin there is already a deep red.

“Have some of this vodka,” Rumlow says.

The soldier takes the bottle when Rumlow presses it into his hand, and takes a drink, although by the looks of it it’s painful for him to swallow. Or maybe it’s just the shitty vodka. Rumlow waits for him to get his breath back after, and then he starts again.

Squeeze and release, squeeze and release. The soldier’s face is flushed almost purple, covered with tears from his air being cut off.

“I—” he rasps out after Rumlow lets him go for the fourth or fifth time.

“What?” Rumlow asks, and then he squeezes down again so the soldier can’t answer.

He looks so angry, despite all the suffering, and it’s wonderful. “It’s ok,” Rumlow says. We are just learning…” —harder, harder— “…a…lesson.”

The soldier’s eyes roll back in his head, and he slumps forward; Rumlow lets go, lets him fall sideways onto the rug.

 

 

Rumlow gets up after a moment, because he's due to take another pill and he’ll need it for what he’s about to be doing. When he comes back, the soldier is still lying there on his side. He doesn’t move as Rumlow comes back to sit on the sofa.

But the soldier is more difficult to knock out than that, and more importantly, Rumlow just knows him well enough to realize he’s not really unconscious. Sure enough, when Rumlow kicks at the soldier’s ribs with the toe of his boot, he opens his eyes to look up at him.

“Stop with the bullshit,” Rumlow says. “You know we’re not done.” He pushes the toe of his boot into the soldier’s hip now. “Take your clothes off.”

It takes a really long time for him to obey the order this time, long enough for Rumlow to contemplate exactly where he’s going to kick him to prompt him to get moving, but finally the soldier stirs, pushing himself up slowly from the dirty rug. Rumlow takes another drink from the bottle as the other man gets himself vaguely upright and starts to undress.

The soldier might have been difficult to render unconscious, but that doesn’t mean he’s not fucked up. The marks on his neck are dark and pronounced, and now that he’s sitting up Rumlow can see that the sclera of one of his eyes is stained red: a blood vessel in there must have burst. And his shoulder—Rumlow hasn’t seen the soldier under bright light with his shirt off since the surgery, or has not paid attention at least, and he had forgotten about that entirely. His left shoulder looks terrible, like something is going wrong on the inside.

He can clearly still move his arm, though, and he manages to undress the rest of the way, dropping his clothes beside him on the rug.

“Back down on your knees,” Rumlow says.

He does it. Somehow, despite everything, he is still glaring.

“Touch yourself,” Rumlow says, and this time he jabs his boot at the soldier’s dick.

And the soldier does that, as well, without playing dumb about needing further elaboration; he wraps his human hand around his own soft dick and after only a moment’s pause, starts moving his fist up and down the length of it, steady, mechanical.

It takes a minute, and Rumlow half-expects a repeat of what had happened the last time he made the soldier do this—but soon enough the soldier is getting hard, his cock growing under the movements of his hand, until the head of it is showing out of the foreskin with every downward stroke. He seems to be trying to get off as soon as possible; the grip looks almost painful.

Rumlow just sits, and watches. The overhead lights in this room are bright; there's a weird fake-chandelier thing with far too many bulbs in it. The soldier’s head is bowed like he’s trying to hide himself from it, his shoulders still slumped, curled in on himself a little, his metal arm held awkwardly at his side like he has to resist the urge to cover something with it.

Being unable to get it up is humiliating, Rumlow thinks, but somehow being able to get it up at a time like this is even more humiliating.

“Aren’t you just a miracle of engineering,” he says.

The soldier’s head is still down; he doesn’t answer. His hand is still moving on himself, back and forth, methodical, pleasureless.

“It’s fucking amazing, how you keep going,” Rumlow says, and then: “I almost wanna take a picture of this. Should I?”

No answer; the soldier is staring down at the floor near Rumlow’s feet.

“What do you think, huh? Take a video, maybe? Send it off to Cap and his buddies?”

The soldier flinches like he’s been hit, like he’s shocked, his hand slowing its determined movement.

“Don’t you dare fucking stop,” Rumlow says, and then he resumes the questioning when the soldier complies. “What’s the matter, huh, kid? You think Cap don’t already know about all your adventures? Hydra keeps good records, we both know that.”

“Don’t say that,” the soldier says softly. He still doesn’t raise his head.

“You think he’s seen tapes already? Or just read about it?”

The soldier lifts his head now, snarling: it’s sudden, but not surprising, and Rumlow is careful not to flinch from it. “I didn’t want to,” he snaps.

But the soldier’s anger had gone nowhere back in the kitchen and it is not going to go anywhere now, so Rumlow keeps going: “But you didn’t fight back, baby, did you?” he says. “Do you think a normal person would have let that happen, the stuff they did to you? You think I would have let that happen?”

His head drops down again, instantly—so easily—and he begins to cry. Not particularly quietly, either: he is full-on sobbing, his whole body shaking with it.

He’s still jerking himself off as he does it, though, and the combination is kind of hilarious.

He cries harder when he realizes Rumlow is laughing at him, which of course just makes it better.

“Okay,” Rumlow says when he’s stopped laughing. “Okay, enough. Stop.”

The soldier stops moving his hand, and looks up at him dumbly. His dick is still hard—he hadn't lost his erection throughout this, which says a lot about how fucked up he is, really—and his expression is furious, his dumb face covered in tears. It’s beautiful, and Rumlow would have liked to fuck with him a bit more, but he’s too horny to push it any further right now.

What he wants to do, instead, is just bend the soldier over the front of the sofa and fuck him from behind, perhaps with Rumlow’s belt pulled tight around his neck, across the bruises the soldier has there already, to summarize that part of the punishment. But Rumlow’s knee wouldn’t be able to take that position, so they’ll have to make do with the sofa. It’s big enough, at least.

“Come here,” he says. He’s starting to undo his belt. “I’m bored. I’m gonna fuck you.”

The soldier doesn’t move.

It’s not just one of his stupid waiting-too-long-just-to-be-annoying pauses, either; he just stays like that, kneeling naked on the dirty carpet and deliberately still, until Rumlow snaps: “What the fuck is it? Get the fuck on my dick right now.”

“Can I…” He sniffs, pauses, maybe because it’s still hard for him to talk. “Can I get some lube first.”

“Did I say you could get some lube first?” Rumlow is going to use the belt on him after all.

“Let me…” the soldier says again, and then stops. He looks so agonized, his face drawn tight and grimacing and still red from crying, his hands curling into fists by his sides, like it’s costing him so much just to ask this one question, even through all of his anger, and—god, it’s actually kind of adorable.

Rumlow can’t help but smile a little. He just can’t hate him as much as Pierce did, because it’s so often it’s almost cute, him being so stupidly helpless like this.

“Fine,” he says as he finishes undoing his pants. “Go get the bottle from the bathroom upstairs.”

The soldier just stares at him blankly for a moment, like he doesn’t believe him.

“I said go, idiot.”

He stands up.

Rumlow waits. This time, the soldier comes back right away. This time, he’s back so soon it’s like he’s fucking eager.

He doesn’t look at Rumlow, just lets Rumlow grab the bottle of lube out of his hands. He waits, watching, as Rumlow spreads it over his dick. Then, following Rumlow's prompts, he climbs over him so that he is straddling Rumlow’s hips. His skin is warm, clammy already with sweat.

And it’s a good thing that Rumlow had let him get the lube: even with it, even with the soldier’s own weight, at first it doesn’t work: Rumlow’s cock slips off to one side, slippery with the lube. He grunts, annoyed, and grabs the soldier’s hips, and the soldier reaches down between his own legs to guide him better, his head down.

“Good,” Rumlow says. “Let me in. There, that’s…” —and it happens, finally, his cock pushing in quickly like a knife into skin, the soldier tensing and squirming even as he lets it happen, leaning forward over Rumlow, one hand pushing hard into the couch cushion next to Rumlow’s head like he needs it to balance.

He is so tight, gripping so tight around Rumlow’s dick, trying to reject it on pure instinct, and there’s something so perfect about the fact that the soldier is still not used to this despite everything, that his body won’t let him be, no matter what Rumlow does to him. That he’s forced to rely fully on Rumlow’s mercy at a time like this.

And he gives him that mercy: it feels good enough for now that Rumlow is satisfied just holding still, his hands still on the soldier’s hips, giving him time to accommodate himself to the intrusion. Above him, the soldier’s face is silhouetted dark against the bright ceiling light, tension visible in his human shoulder. He’s breathing deeply.

“Start moving,” Rumlow says eventually, when just holding still isn’t enough anymore. “I’m still hurt here. You do the work.”

And the soldier does.

It’s like a fucking miracle, actually—the soldier is, for once, showing some of the effort that had once made him good at his job. He moves, steady, paying attention like a feedback loop—adjusting his own speed, gauging the rhythm that gets the most favorable response. Rumlow barely has to move; he can just lie there on the cushions, relaxed and a little stoned from the pills and with his eyes barely open, just letting himself be all content and dazed.

“Fuck,” he can hear himself say. “Fuck, that’s good.”

His eyes have adjusted a bit to the ceiling light, and he can see better now: the muscles in the soldier’s thighs tensing and straining, the shadows of his ribs on his torso, the bruises coming up on his throat, his head still lowered like he’s concentrating.

He’s trying, and getting the soldier to be this good had been so easy that Rumlow hadn’t even meant to do it. Clearly, Rumlow had been way too negative before in his opinions about the situation. Ultimately, the effort involved in containing the soldier is minimal—so minimal that Rumlow can do it when he's hurt and drugged, so minimal that Rumlow has to wonder whether everyone else who’d ever worked with the soldier had just been an utter dumbass. Probably yes.

“That’s good,” he says. “See, you’re learning real good, aren’t you? See how good we can do together.”

The soldier nods, sniffs, keeps going.

Rumlow had waited so long to actually fuck him that he doesn’t have the willpower to draw it out: as soon as he feels his orgasm coming he pulls the soldier forward, so that the soldier is almost lying on top of him, his hair hanging down close to Rumlow’s face. When Rumlow yanks him in closer to bite down on his neck, the soldier doesn’t even break his rhythm.

Rumlow comes, his teeth still digging tight into the bruises on his throat.

It’s a good one, enough for him to almost forget where he is, to white-out the pain that’s still remaining in his body. He’s able to just drift like that for a while, after, still stoned and half-there, and when he does finally recover the soldier is holding on to him, close. His skin is still so warm.

“You’re too heavy,” Rumlow says. “Sit up.”

The soldier does. Upright, he looks down at Rumlow with the kind of guarded uncertainty he usually only shows right after he’s been wiped. He looks almost shy.

Rumlow reaches up and pats his cheek. His skin is damp, and he inclines his head a little toward Rumlow's hand, closing his eyes. Rumlow lets him do it. “You got potential, kid," he says. "Now get off me.”

 

 

 

 

Chapter 11

The doctor jumps up from where he is sitting on the floor when they enter the bathroom the following afternoon. His face is white, his expression already set into the these people are about to kill me look that Rumlow knows extremely well.

“Relax, doc,” Rumlow says. “We’re all friends here.” The soldier is lurking back behind him near the door, and he beckons for him to come stand next to him. “Soldier, take your shirt off.”

The soldier glances at him, looking as surprised as the doctor does. He had followed Rumlow down here without question, because that’s what he has been doing ever since Rumlow fucked him last night: following orders without question. Rumlow had even sent him out in the morning—it was pushing his luck, but they were low on supplies and pills and it was about to start snowing like a motherfucker—but the soldier had come back with everything he’d been told to get.

And then Rumlow had cooked him lunch, and the soldier had eaten and Rumlow had pushed him to eat more, but even after a meal the soldier had still looked unwell, and Rumlow had decided he couldn’t put it off any longer. Rumlow needs the soldier around, in part, because of his somewhat normal appearance. That won’t work if the guy looks like he’s about to drop dead.

Now the soldier removes the shirt he is wearing, without hesitation despite the look of surprise. He lowers his arms, clutching the discarded piece of clothing in his right hand, exposing the mess of his left shoulder. Rumlow takes hold of the soldier’s left arm, yanks him forward closer towards Reyner. “Why don’t you tell me all about this.”

Reyner is still very pale. He looks at Rumlow, then at the soldier, then back at Rumlow again. He looks like he’s about to faint, or scream, or do any number of things that make Rumlow want to kill him right now just out of pure annoyance.

But then, somehow, it passes. The doctor takes a breath, steels himself, and steps forward, closing the distance between them in the small bathroom. He reaches out, and touches the soldier’s shoulder, very gently, like he’s stroking an injured wild animal that might bite. Runs his fingertips over the bands of discolored flesh near the edge of the soldier’s metal arm.

Then, with even more hesitation, he lifts his hand, presses the back of it against the soldier’s forehead.

The soldier doesn’t react. He has gone quiet and motionless, like he always does when he’s being physically examined, and this seems to give Reyner more confidence. He touches the soldier’s shoulder again, using his other hand to shift the soldier’s metal arm in its joint, forward and then back.

“Well?” Rumlow asks.

“I haven’t seen it before myself,” Reyner says. “But the documents...”

“I don’t give a shit about any documents. Tell me why his arm’s all fucked up. Is it infected? Is the arm gonna come off?”

“Oh, no,” he says. “Definitely not. It won’t drop off, it can’t, it’s fused onto his—”

“Get to the point.”

“It’s uh, irritating the—against the metal,” Reyner says. He stands up straighter. “The tissue regrowth from the serum.”

Rumlow blinks at him. “You’re saying his arm is growing back?”

“No,” the doctor says. “No, no. They would have made that happen if it could. It’s just—trying to heal up a bit, and everything inside is getting pushed in the wrong direction. The doctors used to fix it up periodically, and I suppose he was due for some surgery on it before—before it all happened.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all,” he says.

Rumlow doesn’t reply, just looks at him. It doesn’t make much sense for Reyner to lie about the soldier being healthier than he is—even if he is lying and the soldier drops dead, Rumlow is healthy enough now that he could overpower the doctor by himself. But on the other hand, the explanation makes no fucking sense.

“No,” Rumlow says. “Look at him. He’s sick. He’s not eating enough. He’s lost weight. You telling me all that’s because of what, an ingrown toenail?”

The doctor frowns and goes quiet. It takes him a while to speak, like he is piecing the words together in his head beforehand. He looks between the soldier and Rumlow again. Finally, he takes a long breath in and says: “Have you considered the fact that it might be because he’s depressed?”

Rumlow laughs, loud, and it’s only when the doctor doesn’t react that he realizes that he is serious. “Depressed?” he says. “Depressed? He’s a fucking dog.”

“Dogs can get depressed,” the doctor says, defensive.

Rumlow laughs again, but the doctor doesn’t break eye contact, glaring at him with a new confidence that borders on smugness. And it’s that expression, as much as any practical reason, that prompts Rumlow to make his decision.

“Okay then, doc,” he says, “you’re going to fix his arm. Now.”

The smugness evaporates from the doctor’s face, and he stutters. “No,” he says. “No, I can’t—”

“You’re a doctor, buddy,” Rumlow says. “You just said he needs surgery. What the fuck did you expect to happen?”

“I—I can’t operate on him,” he says. “That’s insane. I don’t have restraints. We don’t have any anesthesia left. I don’t—”

“You guys have been best pals all week. He was bringing you presents, doc. Why not make use of this beautiful relationship you two have built up?”

“No,” Reyner says again, and the panic on his face is better than anything Rumlow had expected. He looks like he might cry. “I need time—I have to prepare—”

“Nah, you don’t. You’ll be fine.”

The doctor just keeps spluttering and whining, and finally Rumlow just has to step closer to him, with enough finality that he shuts up. He shrinks back instead, looking just as terrified as the day they’d found him here.

“You don’t get it,” Rumlow says flatly, close enough now to see the beads of new sweat on the doctor’s skin. “This is happening. Right now.”

 

---

 

The office room upstairs hadn’t been cleaned up after Rumlow’s own surgery, which is to be expected, he supposes, but Rumlow still hadn’t realized just how awful it would look. There’s a giant westward-facing window behind the big wooden desk that the doctor had cut him up on, and it’s snowing hard outside now, and the white light from outside makes the whole room almost unnaturally bright—enough to see every detail of the stained towels half-covering the desk, the dirty gauze, the dried blood. The surgical instruments are lying where the doctor had left them, on a little table next to the desk, still smeared with more rust-colored blood. The air still smells of disinfectant. It’d be enough to make Rumlow turn around and leave, if it wasn’t for both the urgency of the situation and for the satisfaction he gets from leading the doctor in here. Reyner is so terrified he is shaking, and if it were his own surgery again Rumlow would be worried about that part. But it’s not.

He lets go of the doctor when they’re both beside the desk, near the table with the old surgical tools, and then turns to the soldier. “Sit down on the edge of the table.”

The soldier does it, slowly. For the first time, Rumlow notices how pale he looks.

“It’s fine,” Rumlow says. “It’s just like cutting a bullet out. Lie back down on the table, you know the drill.”

The soldier doesn’t move.

“Soldier,” he says. “Do it.”

The soldier just looks at him. He looks—bad. Rumlow had shaved him again last night, when he was cleaning him up, and the smooth skin on his face just makes it easier to see how terrible he looks, his skin almost grayish.

“He’s scared,” Reyner says, because apparently being around surgical tools has given him some of his attitude back. Rumlow could swear that the doctor says the words overly slowly, like he’s talking to an idiot.

"Nah, he's just being difficult. Come on soldier, you’ve had much worse.”

The soldier doesn’t move. He doesn’t look defiant, the way he usually does when he’s wasting time or being deliberately annoying. He just stares at Rumlow, his eyes meeting his own, almost like he’s pleading. When Rumlow reaches out to grab hold of his arm and ease him down onto his back, the soldier starts, shrinking away like no one’s ever touched him before.

For fuck’s sake, the doctor is right. He is scared.

Which is some recent bullshit, because he has seen the soldier take much worse than what he's about to get without any complaining. Hell, Rumlow has probably done worse to the soldier when they were both out in the field. The soldier is trained to handle stuff like this; he’d be pretty useless if he wasn’t.

“Soldier,” he says. “Stop the bullshit and lie the fuck down.”

The soldier just looks at him.

“For fuck’s sake,” Rumlow says, and goes to grab him again. It turns out to be a bad idea.

The soldier moves himself sideways as Rumlow reaches for him, ducking out of Rumlow’s grip. On instinct Rumlow grabs at him again, goes to pin him like he would anyone being noncompliant in a situation like this. It works, briefly—Rumlow’s arm around his neck in a light sleeper hold, the soldier stiffening against him but going still. Rumlow has time to catch sight of Reyner, who has backed away from the desk, his eyes wide. Time to hear the soldier’s breathing, feel his carotid pulse thumping hard under his forearm.

“Calm down,” Rumlow hisses, near the soldier’s ear, and what happens next is so insultingly fast that he would have been embarrassed if it had been anyone else: the soldier grips Rumlow’s forearm with his left hand and simply wrenches Rumlow's arm forward, slipping out of Rumlow’s hold and, in one a single graceful motion, using his grip on Rumlow’s arm to shove him face-first into the edge of the wooden desk.

There’s more blood.

It’s everywhere right away, bright blood and sharp pain that cuts through his face, his browbone. He falls, his balance gone, his injured knee hitting the ground, the world darkening with the pain from the impact.

He’s up again almost immediately: this is not his first fight, and he needs to get upright if he can, get his balance. Sees the doctor as he moves—still in the room, now pressed up against the bookshelf next to the wall. He’s not looking at Rumlow; he’s staring wide-eyed in the direction that Rumlow immediately turns to.

The soldier is there, standing in front of the window that makes up most of the back wall of the room. He’s facing them, silhouetted in the bright with his back almost touching the expansive glass, a dark outline against the falling snow outside. Rumlow can tell just from his posture that this is bad.

This is very, very bad.

Rumlow straightens up a little more. He’s injured, yes—his head throbbing like someone has stabbed him, blood warm on his face—but he has to do the only thing anyone has ever been able to do to survive when the soldier breaks programming: go on the offensive.

He takes a step forward, toward the window.

“It’s okay,” he says, keeping his voice quiet. His eyes have adjusted enough now against the glare to make out the soldier’s expression—he looks confused, troubled in a general kind of way, but not terrified or regretful or upset, nothing like how he should be reacting after what he had just done. The soldier’s eyes stay fixed on his.

“Come on, soldier.” Another step forward, closer to the window. It is okay, probably. The soldier hadn’t followed up after temporarily incapacitating Rumlow, hadn’t even taken him down particularly forcefully, not for him. Whatever the hell else is going on with him, he must still remember Rumlow somewhat. He’s just gotta calm him down, snap him out of whatever this bullshit is.

The soldier stands deathly still as Rumlow gets closer, the snow swirling on the other side of the glass behind him, larger pieces of it hitting the window with tiny thuds. Rumlow keeps his voice soft. “Come back to the table.”

“не моя рука,” the soldier says. The tone is firm, almost forceful. Then, slowly, like he’s having trouble finding the words from deep in his memory, he repeats it in English, in the same firm tone. “Not… not my arm.”

“It’s fine, soldier, your arm will be—”

“No,” the soldier says. And then, without turning around, almost as an afterthought, he brings his left arm forward, and slams his fist back with shattering force into the glass behind him.

The room explodes in white.

 

Chapter 12

 

The window had been thick, double-paned to keep the cold out, but the soldier’s arm breaks it like a bomb: a sudden rush of noise and stinging cold and snow. The soldier stands, still facing Rumlow, blocking out the daylight as the last of the pieces of glass hit the doctor’s expensive carpet.

“Not my arm,” he says again, firmly. His right hand is clutched over his left shoulder now, protective, hiding the bare skin and the ugly scarring.

Rumlow doesn’t move, even though the cold air stings his arms and face and makes the cut above his eye hurt even worse, and even though he knows it’s about to get so much worse: the window is gone, and the soldier can get out, the soldier is going to jump. They’re on the second floor, but that’s only a short fall, for him.

And that is the preferable option. He might decide to throw Rumlow out first.

“All right,” he says. He keeps his voice calm, but only because staying calm is the only thing he can think of right now. It’s hard to focus; the thought keeps battering at his brain that this is not working: pacifying the soldier hadn’t been enough this time. Some dregs of memory must have kept the soldier from outright killing him just now, yes, but maybe that won’t last. The soldier is staring at him, eyes fixed on Rumlow’s, but there’s no recognition there. Snow is blowing into the room now from the broken window behind him, battering the bare skin on his torso, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He barely seems to know where he is.

Rumlow is aware of the doctor’s voice off to one side—from the sound of it, Reyner is still cowering by the bookshelf, and clearly hasn’t taken the chance to run like a smart person would have. The doctor’s yelling something, and when Rumlow doesn’t answer or react because he has more important fucking problems right now, the doctor yells the same thing again.

“Shut the fuck up,” Rumlow snaps, and in front of him the soldier winces at the new noise. He takes a tiny step back away from Rumlow, toward the window, his expression darkening. Then his left hand twitches.

Fuck, Rumlow thinks.

He’s going to die now. He is going to die; the soldier is going to panic now and kill him, all because the stupid doctor couldn’t shut up and because he couldn’t shut up, because he’s not at his best after getting his head bashed against a wooden desk. It’s going to end here, after everything, and it’s all because Rumlow was nice and went out of his way to arrange surgery for Hydra’s former pet assassin, to fucking help him—

It’s that train of thought, and the exact emotions that it brings with it, that give him the idea.

It’s not particularly likely to work, but it’s better than nothing.

Rumlow takes a breath of the painfully cold air, and speaks. “All right, soldier,” he says. “You made your fucking point. You can leave.”

The soldier looks at him. The doctor has stopped yelling now. The room is quiet enough to hear the wind moving through the trees near the house outside.

“Fuck off,” Rumlow says, louder. “Leave. I’m done with you. Do you hear me, soldier? You broke that window because you wanted to go. So go.”

The look of confusion that comes over the soldier’s face would have been great, if Rumlow didn’t want to kill everyone in the room right now. He must sound like he means it, because hell, a part of him does mean it. It’s true that he still needs the soldier: for protection now, for a lot of other things later. But that doesn’t change the fact that right now, he is extremely done with his bullshit. It feels good to say it.

He waits. The soldier stands there, his eyes still fixed on Rumlow. He looks so suddenly, overwhelmingly lost that it’s almost pitiable.

“я не помню,” the soldier says finally. “I don’t—”

“Leave,” Rumlow says again, cutting him off. He speaks slowly now, enunciating the words, all calm and steady even though his head is pounding and the cut on his face burns in the cold. “I—don’t—want—you—here. You’re too much trouble. Go. ”

The soldier stares. Pieces of snow are catching on his hair, on the surface of his arm where the heat from his skin won’t melt them. This close, with nothing else to focus on, it’s impossible to miss how bad he looks, his skin an unhealthy shade in the bright light, his lips cracked, his right hand hardly covering the fucked-up skin on his shoulder. Maybe the soldier really is just too far gone to understand or remember. Maybe he will leave.

But then all at once something in the soldier’s expression ruptures, like glass cracking.

“No,” he says.

“What?” Rumlow asks.

The soldier looks past him, like he’s scanning for something else in the room that isn’t there, then back at Rumlow’s face. “No,” he says again, quieter. The expression that’s coming over his face now is far more familiar: a kind of quiet, confused misery.

Rumlow keeps his voice steady. “I don’t understand what you’re telling me,” he prompts. “You gonna stay here? That what you’re saying?”

The soldier doesn’t answer. He just stares at Rumlow, looking all confused and upset, like a fucking idiot. Then his posture changes, slumping, his head dropping slightly. Making himself smaller, as if by doing that he can avoid anyone noticing he’s standing in front of a wall-sized window he just destroyed. He lets go of his shoulder, his right arm falling back to his side.

“Well?” Rumlow says.

The soldier nods.

Rumlow exhales, quietly. What do you know, it worked.

“Fine,” he says, keeping his voice neutral. “Then let’s go.”

This time the soldier doesn’t move when Rumlow steps forward, so Rumlow keeps going, glass crunching under the soles of his boots, and reaches out and takes the soldier by the right arm. The soldier lets him.

He guides the soldier away from the window, but not forcefully: right now, it’s necessary to make it clear that this is of the soldier’s own volition, that he’s not being compelled. The soldier does not resist, and Rumlow leads him back over to the same wooden desk that the soldier had just slammed his head into.

“Lie down,” Rumlow says.

From the side of the room where he’s still cowering, Reyner pipes up: “Oh, you gotta be kidding me.”

The soldier, for his part, hasn’t moved: he’s staring down at the desk, looking uncertain.

“You’re not trying this again,” Reyner goes on. “He—he broke the—he just—”

“You never trained an animal before? If he gets out of this now, we’re rewarding him for misbehavior. Lie down, soldier.”

The soldier at last complies: first sitting down on the edge of the desk, then laying himself onto his back on the wooden surface.

“You gotta be kidding me,” the doctor says again.

“See?” Rumlow says to the soldier, ignoring him. “You don’t get your way by throwing a tantrum.”

The soldier doesn’t respond. The cold surface of the table seems to be bothering him; he squirms a little, shifting his position. His eyes are on the ceiling.

“I can’t do it,” Reyner goes on. “Not in here. Even if he—if he lets me. It’s too cold, for god’s sake.”

“You’ll manage,” Rumlow says. “Get here.”

The doctor stands up. He makes a face like he has swallowed something very uncomfortable and poisonous as he does so, but he doesn’t complain anymore. Which is good, because Rumlow was really starting to lose patience with that bullshit—the soldier needs this treatment, and does Reyner really think there’s going to be a better opportunity for him to get it anytime soon? He still doesn’t know why, exactly, the soldier had just freaked out so much, and of course it could happen again. But that isn’t going to change. The soldier isn’t going to wake up tomorrow and decide not to be brain-damaged. They might as well do this now.

He watches as the doctor, huddling into himself a little against the cold, shuffles over to the little table next to the desk with the surgical instruments still laid out on it.

“Can I at least go wash my hands?” he asks.

“Nah, he’ll be fine.”

Reyner sighs. The room has lost enough of its warmth now that Rumlow can see his breath. On the desk, the soldier hasn’t moved. His eyes are closed now. When Rumlow steps back from the desk to give them room, the scene looks more like an autopsy than anything else.

There’s a heating vent in the floor over near the wall; Rumlow moves closer to it and finds that it’s still working. The warmth is nice, but more importantly, standing here means that if the soldier freaks out again it won’t be Rumlow’s problem. Not at first, anyway.

In front of him, the doctor is still looking down at the instruments on the table like he doesn’t know where to start. He finally selects one of the scalpels, handling it like he’s picking up a venomous snake. “God damn it,” Rumlow hears him say under his breath, and then he moves to start.

Despite himself, Rumlow winces.

The doctor cuts, and the soldier twitches and makes a noise, his hands clenching into fists. The doctor keeps going—Rumlow can already see the blood dripping down along the top of the soldier’s shoulder near his neck—and the soldier’s fists clench tighter, his boots moving against the smooth surface of the desk like he is trying to kick against something.  And then—

He goes still.

Rumlow lets out a breath. The doctor is still working. The soldier is breathing heavily, but apart from that he has stopped moving.

“Huh,” Rumlow says. “That was almost anticlimactic, wasn’t it.”

Reyner makes a noise that sounds a lot like disgust. He sets down the scalpel, picks up another tool. “It’s because of his arm,” he says.

“What?”

“He thought we were going to hook him up.” Reyner says without looking up at him.

“What?”

“I’m trying to concentrate,” he snaps.

It’s the type of comment that Rumlow would usually follow up on, but the doctor is doing what needs to be done right now, so it can wait.

The doctor keeps going. It’s quiet, except for the soldier’s breathing, which is still ragged and uneven. The room still smells clean with the outside air; he can’t smell the blood. When the doctor tells the soldier to turn onto his side so that he can get to his shoulder from a different angle, the soldier complies, but otherwise stays still. Rumlow keeps his eyes off what the doctor is actually doing, which is far more involved and gross than he had expected. But apart from that, he finds that it’s not actually that awful to watch. He’s never been particularly into blood, and shit like this on a whole is just unpleasant, even when it’s not being done to him. But right now it all just seems… fitting, somehow. The soldier had held him down, before, when Rumlow had been the one getting hurt in this room. Rumlow can’t hold him down now, but he can watch.

“You’re only feeding him solid food,” the doctor says. “It’s not enough.”

Rumlow looks up at him, still half in his train of thought. “What?”

“For weight gain,” he says. “Try him on protein shakes, high-calorie drinks. He’s underweight. You said so yourself.”

Whatever, Rumlow thinks. “Can you just finish butchering him so we can move on?”

The doctor ignores the comment. “He wasn’t getting so many of his calories from solid food beforehand, and his body isn’t used to it. If you keep trying to feed him like that, he’ll carry on dropping weight.”

Rumlow sighs. This guy just can’t learn when to shut the fuck up for his own good. “You his caretaker now?”

“I’m trying to help.  He is evidently—” the doctor pauses, like he he’d lost courage halfway through the sentence. “He’s not well.”

“Yeah. I grasped that.”

“There might be some leftover shakes one of the cabinets in the kitchen. My wife used to drink them.” He pauses, then goes on as if Rumlow has expressed interest. “She died in the Triskelion.”

“Yeah, well,” Rumlow says, “we both know who you can thank for that.”

The doctor goes quiet. At last.

It’s maybe five minutes after that when he sets the last surgical tool down on the table. He exhales and says: “Well, that’s as good as I can get it.”

“It’s done?”

“It’s the best I can do right now.”

He starts messing around with tape and bandages, which he doesn’t seem to be very good at applying. Rumlow steps forward, back toward the desk. The doctor starts talking again, saying something about stitches, about keeping the shoulder immobilized, but Rumlow can’t help but focus more on the soldier. He’s on his back again, and the gauze that Reyner had just taped across his shoulder is showing blood already. He has been sweating, despite the cold; his skin is shiny with it. His eyes are closed, and judging by the wetness on the skin around them, he has been crying.

Sure, Rumlow doesn’t like blood much, but this? He could get used to this.

He reaches out, gently brushes near the edge of the damp gauze.  The soldier’s skin is hot, inflamed. “What did you mean before?” he says, his eyes still on the wound.

“What?” Reyner says.

“You said it’s because of his arm, then stopped. What was that about?”

The doctor doesn’t answer right away, and Rumlow looks up at him. He is still standing near the head of the desk where Rumlow is standing, trying to wipe his hands clean with a not-very-clean towel. The table next to him is scattered with bloodied tools. “The training they gave him,” he says, dully. “There’s still a lot of nerve tissue left inside his shoulder. If you read between the lines in all the reports, it’s quite—you can tell that it was part of what the Russians used for his initial training.”

“Training?”

“Torture,” the doctor says, like he’s speaking to a child. “Using the tech in his arm to interface directly with the brachial plexus to—do you not understand what I’m saying?”

“You think he thought we were gonna do that? Here?” Rumlow glances back down at the soldier. “Jesus, soldier, I told you we were trying to help you. I thought you’d had this done before.”

“He’s not well,” the doctor says again.

“Yeah, and you tell me all this now. Why didn’t you mention it earlier?"

“I tried,” Reyner says. “I believe you said, and I quote, shut the fuck up.”

That’s actually kind of a good point.

Rumlow shrugs, looks down at the soldier again, whose eyes are still closed. “Huh, kid,” he says. “You’re even more fucked up than I thought.”

From next to him, there’s the sound of the doctor clearing his throat. And then, loud in the quiet room: “What the hell is wrong with you?”

Rumlow glances up; the loudness is a surprise, and the anger, and maybe that’s how the doctor is able to achieve what he does next.

There’s the tiniest of sounds—clinking metal—and then Reyner is close and something small and fast in the doctor’s hand is slicing upwards in the air towards him, just a flash of silver as it—

—is stopped a few inches from the side of Rumlow’s neck, of course, by the soldier’s hand.

His right hand, which is now wrapped around the doctor’s wrist. The soldier had grabbed it without even sitting up all the way, his left shoulder and arm still neatly immobilized, as the doctor had instructed.

Reyner, above him, doesn’t even look surprised. He stands there, the scalpel he’d picked up still held tight in his grip, glaring at Rumlow. Like glaring is more important to him, like the soldier having hold of him is nothing.

The soldier, meanwhile, turns his head to look at Rumlow. His expression is dull. Like this it’s routine, like he is half asleep.

“Don’t kill him,” Rumlow hears himself say. “We still need him for one thing.”

The words are automatic, far away, like someone else is talking. His whole body feels frozen, like the cold in the room had finally gotten inside him. How the fuck had he let that happen? The soldier getting the drop on him was one thing, but this idiot?

“Just take him back downstairs and tie him up again,” he goes on, still so distant, and at least his voice doesn’t shake. “We’re done with him, for now.”

The soldier finally sits up properly, keeping the doctor’s wrist grasped in his hand. The doctor still doesn’t react. No fear on his face, although he has to know that very bad things are coming. Just that same anger and disgust.

The soldier makes it upright okay, standing up with next to no unsteadiness, as if half of the desk isn’t still wet with his blood. He keeps hold of Reyner easily, squeezing his wrist until he drops the scalpel and then moving him away like nothing had happened. The doctor is still glaring at Rumlow when the soldier leads him off.

And that’s the worst part. Rumlow is the one left standing here, beaten up, taken by surprise. The only one scared and shaken is him.

 

---

 

He leaves the room, closes the door behind him, the sudden temperature change making him shiver despite himself. In the bathroom, he takes an extra pill, and then another one, and avoids looking at himself in the mirror.

He showers, which probably isn’t a good idea after the extra medication he just consumed, but he’s freezing and covered in his own blood, so he’ll risk it. The pills have taken the edge off the pain in his face, but it still aches, and the unscarred parts of his hands sting from the cold.

There’s no dry towels left in the bathroom, because of course there aren’t. The soldier isn’t the type to worry about picking stuff up off the floor once he’s used it.

“Fuck,” Rumlow says to the empty bathroom.

The soldier had beat him up, the doctor had seen the soldier beating him up. Had learned from it. And yet Rumlow had stood there like an idiot, with the soldier apparently incapacitated, next to a hostage and a bunch of sharp blades. There is no excuse for such a fuck up. Blow to the head or not.

He’s not even angry, not at himself, or the soldier. He’s too tired to be angry. There’s just the cold, dull realization that always used to sit there in the background after a mission had gone to hell. When things were fucked up beyond the point that any emotion could do any good.

Except now there aren’t even any others involved. He’s on his own. He doesn’t even have any dry towels.

He makes a short, unpleasant attempt to dry himself with one of the damp towels from the floor, and leaves the bathroom.

The soldier’s already back in the bedroom, sitting in the armchair near the bed.

Him being there shouldn’t be a surprise, after all this time, but Rumlow still has to stop himself from reacting. The gauze on the soldier's shoulder is still covered in blood. There's blood on his chest and his metal arm as well, dried.

“Did he get downstairs ok?” Rumlow asks, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

The soldier nods, sitting up slightly. To someone who didn’t know him very well, his posture might seem almost defiant—his shoulders squared, looking at Rumlow directly. Rumlow, unfortunately, knows him better than that. It’s like a guilty dog playing at being good by acting overly attentive. The soldier knows he has fucked up.

Lucky for him, Rumlow doesn’t have the energy. Not now, anyway. He heads towards the bed, ignores the soldier’s eyes on him. It’s barely evening, and the sun isn’t even going down yet, but he needs to sleep off the meds and at least some of the pain. He lies down, drags the covers over himself, and says: “Fuck off, would you.”

Of course, the soldier doesn’t move. “You need help. Your face.”

“No, I need you to fuck off. I’m tired of dealing with you. Just go away and let me fucking pretend you don’t exist for a while. Fuck off,” he repeats, for good measure.

The soldier might get up then, or might not: by this point, Rumlow doesn’t care. He finds a position to lie in that doesn’t hurt his face too bad, drags another pillow over his head to block out the light in the room. It hurts—everything still hurts—but the pills are kicking in strong. He sleeps.

 

 

 

Chapter 13

Notes:

thank you for all the comments, they bring me joy

 

He wakes up in a tangle of pain, thirst, and needing to piss. His mouth is dry; there’s sharp pain in his face like he’s pulled something open while he slept. A deeper pain behind that, throbbing through the bones of his skull.

It has gotten dark outside, but it's not quite dark enough to hide the fact that the soldier is still in the room. Still sitting in the same chair, even though Rumlow must have been out for hours. He’s silent: it’s quiet enough to hear snow tapping softly against the window outside.

Rumlow turns onto his side, painfully, reaches out to the cluttered table next to the bed, pushing aside wrappers and empty containers the soldier had left there in order to reach the lamp and turn it on. The soldier doesn’t move, doesn’t flinch at the sudden light. He’s just sitting there there, his left arm curled stiffly against his body, staring fixedly at Rumlow. God damn he is creepy.

At least needing to piss gives Rumlow a valid reason to not deal with him for a few more minutes. He gets up, ignoring the soldier completely, and heads to the bathroom.

There’s some leftover surgical tape and other bandages in the bathroom from earlier, and after washing his hands he’s able to clean and then tape up the cut on his face somewhat. It won’t hold the wound together like stitches would have, but it’s not like he can actually look any worse, so whatever. He takes another pill, drinks some water. He’s hungry, and he could put on some clothes and go downstairs and make some food, and ignore the soldier for a bit longer. But that’s bullshit—Rumlow never got anywhere by avoiding the soldier when he’s being creepy. He needs to deal with the problem.

He goes back to the bedroom and sits back down on the edge of the bed, still naked, facing where the soldier is sitting in the armchair. There’s an almost-empty bottle of whiskey stashed beside the bed, and he stoops to pick it up, takes a drink. The air in the room is cool on his bare skin, making the cut on his head sting worse under the tape. He hates that he’s tense.

The soldier, unsurprisingly, still has not moved. There’s more dried blood on his shoulder, not just on the dressings the doctor had put over the surgical wound but more of smeared on the skin around it, dried dark on the metal. The dressings look like they’re starting to come loose in a few places, too. The soldier’s face is set into his usual stupid glare, except now it also looks like he has been crying: his eyes are all red and sad.

“You feel any better?” Rumlow says.

The soldier stares. To be fair, it was kind of a stupid question.

“You know where you are now?” he prompts. Really he just wants to get the soldier talking, because sometimes that’s enough to snap him out of shit like this. But the soldier just looks at him in vague confusion, like he’s seeing Rumlow for the first time in his life, but is somehow also very angry with him.

“Soldier,” Rumlow says, louder.

The soldier reacts, finally, his expression shifting into a frown. “I was lying down…” he says. He trails off.

“What’s that?” Rumlow had wanted to get him talking, yes, but the aim had been to get him talking about something that remotely made sense.

“On my back,” the soldier says, like it’s a normal answer. “That was before I…” He trails off again, frowns some more like he’s trying to remember. He has definitely been crying; the wetness on his face catches in the light from the lamp when he moves.

“Soldier—”

“I didn’t want to go anywhere,” the soldier says, cutting him off.

He hates that he’s still tense, even when he’s holding back from slapping him. Hates that it’s maybe why he’s not slapping him. “Do you know who I am?”

Finally, it seems to work. The soldier looks at him again, and seems to come back to the present. He blinks, and then nods.

Rumlow exhales. “Good. Now, will you—”

The soldier speaks again, cutting him off again. “Don’t give me to anyone else.”

Great. He’s still not making sense. “What do you mean?”

Despite the words, the soldier’s tone is not pleading: he speaks firmly, like he is giving orders to a subordinate.

“I don’t want to go to anyone else,” he says. Slow, emphatic. “Don’t give me to anyone else.”

“Okay,” Rumlow says slowly, because what else can he do at this point. “I’m not going to do that.”

“You said you would,” the soldier says. “You said you’d send me away.”

“And I just said I’m not going to do that.” Rumlow says.

The soldier doesn’t answer. Rumlow doesn’t look away when he meets his eyes. The soldier looks at him like something complicated is going on in his head, like some old creaky wheels in there are trying to turn.

It’s not working. Honestly, maybe Rumlow should just take the soldier out back into the snow and euthanize him. Just shoot the poor bastard like a sick dog. It would fuck up his own plans, but it’d be the merciful thing to do right now.

But then the soldier shifts, his eyes more alert, and then he moves forward, sudden, like he’s going to stand. Rumlow starts a little, hand gripping the bottle tighter, and hates himself for it.

But the soldier doesn’t stand, or even start to. Instead he drops to his knees, onto the carpet in front of the armchair. Rumlow watches silently as the soldier leans forward to rest his weight onto his good arm, and then crawls.

Or close to it, anyway: his left arm’s still curled up against his torso. But he moves like that, on his knees and his other hand, crossing the short span of carpet until he’s on his knees directly in front of Rumlow. 

It’s happened so quickly, from the soldier sitting there unmoving to this, that Rumlow almost shivers. And then he does shiver, because the soldier is closer and now he’s pressing his face against the bare skin on the inside of Rumlow’s knee, and goddamn the skin on his face is cold.

He resists the urge to shove him away, just takes another drink instead, and the soldiers rests there, burying his wet face into his leg.

Rumlow lets him, despite himself. The soldier acting like this isn’t weird, really: he’d liked to do this a lot, back in the day. But the obedient posture isn’t putting Rumlow at ease like it should. There’s something else, some warning system going off in the back of Rumlow's head, something beyond any potential physical danger from the soldier, beyond any of the other fucked up things that are going on right now. The soldier is technically being good, and yet Rumlow still has the sudden desire to leave, just push him away and get the fuck out of the room.

But fuck that: he’s already decided that avoiding the situation won’t get him anywhere. 

He pushes the soldier back a bit, but only so he can lean over and set the whiskey bottle down on the bedside table. The soldier watches him do it, his eyes wide and vague. When Rumlow straightens up again the soldier pushes his face back against the inside of his thigh, right above the knee, the skin of his cheek cool against his own skin. Rumlow thinks he’ll ask him another question to see if he’s all there yet, but the soldier pre-empts any action: he lifts his face, looking up at Rumlow for a moment, and then moves in closer, between his legs.

When Rumlow doesn’t stop him it’s almost out of habit: he shifts himself forward on the bed, spreads his knees wider to make room without jostling the soldier’s bad shoulder. It’s pretty much an automatic action at this point, and maybe he shouldn’t be letting the soldier act like things are back to normal, but on the other hand maybe normal is better than whatever the hell had been going on just now.

The soldier moves with more confidence now he realizes he’s not going to get pushed away. He ducks forward, and the cold of the metal arm as it brushes against the inside of Rumlow's bare leg is enough to make Rumlow wince, but the inside of the soldier's mouth is as warm as ever.

Rumlow isn’t hard, which means the soldier can take him all the way down right away, sudden enough to almost make him groan. The soldier keeps himself pushed up close to him as Rumlow’s dick grows with blood, opening his mouth a bit wider as it happens and letting Rumlow thrust up into the back of his mouth. It’s pleasant enough, although the warning feeling from before is not quite gone, and he doesn’t like that.

Rumlow cups the back of the soldier’s head out of habit, although he doesn’t really have to: the soldier can’t quite fit Rumlow’s whole dick in his mouth now, not yet, but he’s getting decently warmed up. Rumlow just has to nudge with his fingertips at the base of the soldier’s skull and the soldier complies, pushes himself forward. Rumlow helps him along with his hand, gentle but firm, till he’s beyond the back of the soldier's mouth, till—

There it is, the tight, wet press of the inside of his throat. The soldier makes a little muffled noise but stays still, close, letting Rumlow hold him there for a few seconds...

...and then his throat convulses, and the soldier pulls off and back, gasping in a breath. Rumlow keeps hold of his hair. In front of him the soldier’s eyes are wet already, his mouth and chin shiny with spit. He raises his good hand, wipes at his chin.

Rumlow lets go of his hair and slaps him across the face. The soldier’s head rocks back; he stares up at Rumlow with the same dull expression he often gets after he’s been hit.

“I didn’t say you could do that,” Rumlow says. His voice comes out low, a bit uneven.

The soldier nods, eyes still fuzzy, and then Rumlow hits him again for good measure, because he wants to and because his own head still hurts. The soldier takes it, swaying to the side a little to absorb the blow. It’s a decent reaction, he has to admit, and Rumlow cups his head again, pulls him forward.

He pushes into his mouth again, not giving him any warm-up time this time, because he’s not going to go easy on him just because he’s being good. The soldier lets him, opening his jaw as much as he can and even leaning forward a bit on his own volition, and Rumlow might still be in a bad mood but there’s something to be said about an enthusiastic blowjob, especially when it's the type of blowjob Rumlow likes. His hand’s still cupped near the base of the soldier's skull, the soldier’s ear cold under the heel of Rumlow's palm. The soldier lasts longer this time but eventually gags, pulling his head back again and drawing in another breath.

He’s gasping a bit deeper than Rumlow would expect for such a relatively short period without air, and he realizes that it’s because he’s gotta breathe through his mouth: his nose is stuffed up from all the crying he’d been doing.

Rumlow laughs, and the soldier looks up at him, but if the reaction bothers him he doesn’t show it. His left arm is still clutched protectively against his torso. His face is flushed red, a harsher shade down the side of his face where Rumlow had slapped him. His eyes are red too. The light from the lamp nearby makes it easy to see how messy he is: tears, drool, sweat. The soldier leaves it all there, because apparently he can be a quick learner when he wants to be.

Rumlow doesn’t even have to nudge his head again this time. The soldier takes another breath, and leans forward again.

Rumlow strokes his hair now, the back of his neck; the skin is warmer there now too. The soldier seems to like that, because he pushes himself in even closer, even moaning a bit as he does it, as if there’s nothing he’d rather be doing than impaling himself on Rumlow’s cock. It’s nice to watch, really nice, and it’s amazing that the soldier has somehow never managed to lose his gag reflex, but it’s all right.

The soldier seems to have gotten his bearings now, and the next time he gags he doesn’t pull off all the away, just moves back enough to get in a decent breath and then keeps going. Rumlow holds him in close, twisting and tightening his fingers in the soldier’s hair, and the time after that when the soldier gags Rumlow is already deep enough that the motion doesn’t force his cock out and instead just tightens around it, the muscles in his throat contracting around the head of his dick. Rumlow moans, and the soldier makes a noise too, his mouth so close against Rumlow's skin now that Rumlow can feel the vibrations of the sounds he's making all through him.

“Fuck,” Rumlow says out loud, and grips down tighter on the soldier's hair.

The soldier moans again, or as close as he can get to a good moan with his throat being fucked. He’s pushing so close to him, despite everything, his throat so open to the violation, the skin of his face and his lips so warm against him. Rumlow holds him there, his other hand cradling the back of the soldier’s head now, hand firm against his hair as he rocks his hips against him, into him. It’s so tight it’s unnatural, an even deeper violation than when he fucks his ass, the soldier stiff and tortured up against his skin, his throat working in useless rejection. One particularly bad gag, and Rumlow feels the soldier pull back, his body hauling off automatically to fight for air—

And then he stops, and pushes himself forward again.

Jesus, Rumlow thinks, and of course then it’s over. A few seconds of deeper thrusts, and the soldier is gagging around him, again and again, the movements as steady as waves breaking on a shore, tighter around him than should be possible as Rumlow comes down his throat, the soldier still pressed up close like he loves it. Stays pushed up against him, even afterwards.

When Rumlow lets go, his palms are damp from the soldier’s hair.

The soldier pulls back a bit finally and then breathes deep, hard enough for Rumlow to feel his breath against the sweat on his own skin. The soldier’s face is wet too, smeared all over with drool and tears. His head droops to the side like he’s exhausted, and he rests his forehead against the inside of Rumlow’s thigh again, gasping in a few deep, pained-sounding breaths.

It’s not unpleasant to watch, so Rumlow lets the soldier stay that way, slowly catching his breath, until he starts getting too cold and bored. He nudges the soldier away with his foot—the soldier sits up and shuffles backwards immediately—and then moves back onto the mattress, pausing on his way to grab the whiskey bottle again.

The soldier looks up at him from where he’s kneeling. His hair’s all hanging in his face now, sticking to his forehead with the sweat. He’s flushed, still breathing a bit unevenly, his arm pinned awkwardly against his body. He stares up at Rumlow for a moment, then moves like he’s going to stand.

“No,” Rumlow says. “Not yet. You’re not ready yet.”

The soldier’s face switches from its usual blankness to a frown: he looks both confused and suddenly close to panic. He must know he’s still on thin ice. It’s adorable.

Rumlow makes the soldier wait like that for just a moment, then says: “Your face. It’s a mess. Clean it off before you get up here.”

The soldier pauses, hardly looking any less panicked, and Rumlow can almost see the wheels turning in his stupid head. He must figure he’s still not supposed to wipe his face with his hand, and he’s trying to work out what Rumlow wants him to do.

It only takes him a second to figure it out, which is honestly impressive for him, and when he does figure it out there’s no complaining—not even a look of disgust—which is a plus as well. He just stares up at Rumlow for a moment longer, his face as blank as ever now, and then shifts back slightly, away from the bed, before lowering himself down towards the carpeted floor.

Rumlow leans forward a little to see better, just in time to see the soldier press his face down into the carpet. He stops for a moment like that, like he’s getting used to the idea, and then he rubs his face back and forth against the rough surface, like a dog that’s being punished.

“Huh,” Rumlow says. “You’re not as dumb as you look.”

The soldier doesn’t respond; he finishes what he’s doing and then lifts his head, looks up at him.

“More,” Rumlow says.

The soldier pushes his face into the carpet again. Rumlow takes another drink from the bottle.

He thinks he hears him make a noise this time, but he keeps doing it, bent over to the floor like that and scratching his face up on the carpet, until finally Rumlow laughs and says: “Okay. Stop.”

The soldier sits up again, pushing himself up with his good arm. The skin on his face is red from the friction of the nylon fibers now as well as from the slaps and the rough blowjob. He’s a fucking mess.

“That’ll do,” Rumlow says. “Get up here.”

The soldier nods, and moves silently towards the bed. He crawls without standing—he’s figured that part out too, for now. His face is still blank: honestly, this is the most he has seen the soldier act like his old self since Rumlow found him again.

It’s a nice thing to watch, and Rumlow takes another drink and then moves over, making room for him. When he’s on the mattress and close to him the soldier pauses, like he’s waiting for further instruction. Up closer now, his face honestly looks pretty terrible, even apart from the scraped-up skin: the carpet isn’t exactly absorbent, and rubbing his face hadn’t done much except distributed the mess more evenly.

But that’s just another opportunity: Rumlow reaches out with his free hand, cups the back of the soldier’s head again, and pushes, and the soldier goes down with absolutely no resistance, his face into the sheets.

“Rub,” Rumlow says, and the soldier does.

“Decent work,” he says after he lets go of the soldier’s head. “Good job not fucking up everything today.”

The soldier sits up a little, then nods like it’s a genuine compliment.

Rumlow lies down, setting the near-empty bottle down on the table on the other side. The soldier’s behaving reasonably well, Rumlow’s balls are empty, and yet the feeling from before has not completely gone away. That annoys him, but he’s going to ignore it. He gestures for the soldier to come towards him, and that is apparently enough to flip a switch: the soldier moves fast, burrowing up against his Rumlow’s side, and Rumlow immediately regrets his choices, because the soldier’s lying on his right side and digging his right hand up against the side of Rumlow's torso and his skin there is freezing, and the rest of him isn’t much better. Rumlow grimaces and shoves him away a bit, and then sits up enough to get the blankets pulled up over them. The soldier, undaunted, simply moulds himself back against him as soon as Rumlow lies back down, as freezing as ever.

“God, you’re cold,” Rumlow says. “You go wandering around outside and get lost while I was asleep or something?”

The soldier doesn’t answer, and it occurs to Rumlow, now that he’s slightly less dazed from pain and immediate post-orgasm, that the soldier had lost quite a lot of blood. And, clearly, is too dumb to have done anything about it. Rumlow is gonna have to get up and at least get some liquids into him—some more liquids into him, is the joke he would have made if anyone was around who could appreciate it—sooner or later. But it can wait.

The soldier’s obviously enjoying the warmth, in any case: he moves in closer against Rumlow’s side, head against his shoulder. He smells like dried blood and antiseptic solution and sex and still, somehow, like the doctor’s stupid shampoo underneath it all, and he’s still breathing weird, but Rumlow lets him. It’s a surprise when he talks: Rumlow had almost forgotten he did that.

“You’re good to me,” he says, softly, against the skin of his shoulder.

“Yeah I know,” Rumlow says. “Be quiet now, I’m trying to rest.”

He closes his eyes to emphasize the point, but the soldier, of course, doesn’t listen. He presses his face close against him, his breath ticklish on Rumlow's skin. “You’re good to me,” he says again. “You’re so good to me, I love you, you’re so…”

Rumlow opens his eyes, and lifts his head up off the pillow, sitting up enough for the blankets to fall back. “What?!”

The soldier’s still lying on his side: he looks up at Rumlow, blank and confused, like he’d already forgotten what he said.

“Shut up with that—that bullshit,” Rumlow says. God, just when the soldier had almost been acting normal again, and just when Rumlow had almost gotten his mind off all the bullshit. “Your brain’s fucking up.”

The soldier keeps staring at him with that same dumb expression. He looks like he has no idea what he’s done wrong.

“Do you—do you even know where you are?”

“Yes,” the soldier says.

Rumlow's not sure whether to believe that or not: both options are bad. “Okay,” he says slowly. “Then shut the fuck up.”

The soldier nods. He looks confused, but not terribly upset, although he pouts a bit when Rumlow throws the blankets back and sits up at the edge of the bed. He doesn’t speak, though.

Not a huge deal, Rumlow thinks. The soldier is programmed for loyalty and attachment; he’s going to glitch sometimes. It's really just another way of being a huge fucking disappointment.

“You’re good at ruining the moment, kid,” he says, and starts looking around for his clothes. “I’m gonna go get some food.”

 

 

 

Chapter 14

Notes:

Thank you again for all the comments :)

 

There’s steak in the house now, bought by the soldier with the doctor’s money, and Rumlow decides to cook it up for breakfast the next morning. The soldier could probably use the extra iron, and plus, it might turn out to be a big day.

The soldier follows him into the kitchen, sits down on one of the stools beside the cluttered kitchen island. He watches, hunched over and silent, as Rumlow starts the steak cooking on the stove and then begins a long search for clean dishware. He’s less of a mess now, thanks to the shower Rumlow had told him to take earlier, but the dressings on his shoulder still look pretty awful, tattered and stained dark red. Rumlow’s happy for an excuse not to look at him for a while.

When the food is ready, Rumlow sets a plate and cutlery down in front of him.

“Thank you,” the soldier says, and Rumlow stops right there next to where the soldier is sitting, staring at him like an idiot.

The soldier doesn’t say thank you. Not for something like this. It’s the type of weird bullshit that Rumlow doesn’t need on a morning when his head still hurts this bad.

The soldier is apparently too distracted to notice his reaction: he tries to move his left arm to pick up his fork and winces, pausing the movement, and then just stops moving altogether, staring down at the plate like he’s angry at it. The soldier might be exhibiting even less brainpower than usual these days, but he has apparently at least managed to calculate that you need two hands to cut a steak.

Rumlow reaches over, grabs the plate and yanks it back toward himself. “Here. I’ll do it for you.” He supposes he should give the soldier credit for not just picking the whole piece of meat up and tearing off chunks with his teeth.

When he’s done cutting up the meat, he shoves the plate back over to him. No thank you this time, at least; the soldier just picks up his fork with his right hand and starts eating.

Rumlow goes and gets his own food, but then spends most of the time just staring at the man sitting across from him.

He’d had plans for today—plans which are frankly overdue—but right now he’s wondering if any of it actually a good idea. It’s not just that he feels like shit physically, although he does. And it’s not just unease after the soldier’s freakout yesterday: as much as it sucks to admit it, some level of feeling uneasy around the soldier is just a part of working with him. No, it’s something else.

Across from him, the soldier is still eating. He’s holding his left arm close against his torso, as if it’s in a sling. As if someone had deactivated it. He ignores Rumlow, eating silently with his head lowered, like he is the only one in the room.

“You want more?” Rumlow asks when he’s almost done.

The soldier nods without looking up, and Rumlow pushes his own plate over.

“Thank you,” the soldier says again.

“Shut the fuck up,” Rumlow says. 

The soldier acts like he hadn’t heard, so that Rumlow is left just glaring at him, because the soldier has, as always, managed to somehow make things worse. Thank you is not right. Thank you is not normal. Hydra’s pet supersoldier might have been trained for obedience, but he has always been accustomed to being valuable property, and any resources used on him were things that the soldier has always just assumed he deserved. Having his basic needs taken care of is not something he has ever thanked people for, not unless he was specifically ordered to.

This new weirdness just adds to the general discomfort, even if it’s not enough to fully explain it. It’s something like the feeling he’d had last night: a low, steady sensation of just wanting out. Wanting to get the fuck away from all of this.

Which is a fucking stupid thing for him to be feeling right now, because leaving this place is exactly what he is trying to do.

He waits until the soldier’s almost done with his second helping, and then says: “I’m gonna need your help with the doctor one last time.”

The soldier doesn’t answer at first. He keeps looking down at his plate, unsurprised, like the subject is something he had expected. Eventually, he says: “I told you I wasn’t going to kill anyone.”

“Who said anything about killing?”

The soldier looks up at him, finally. Glaring, which is close enough to normal to actually be a relief.

“Look, kid,” Rumlow says. “We can’t stay in this house forever. You know that.”

No answer, and he decides to skip past some of the details. “We wanna make sure we get all the information we need before we both move on. Get it from the doctor, I mean.”

The soldier is still glaring at him. He looks tired, pale under the bright overhead lights in the kitchen. He says: “You want me to torture him.”

Rumlow laughs, and the soldier winces like he’s been hit. “No,” Rumlow says. “Not at all. I mean, I’d like for someone to torture him. That would be great to watch. But that’s not what I’m talking about.”

The soldier stares at him, silent. He looks even more tired than Rumlow feels, which is saying a lot.

“Torture’s good for a bunch of things,” Rumlow says. “But it’s no good for getting accurate information.”

“Never stopped you before,” the soldier says.

He ignores that. “That’s why I need you to do this. Get info, I mean.”

The soldier stares at him some more.

“Reyner likes you,” Rumlow goes on. “I want you to talk to him, soldier. Ask him for the information we need. That’s it. I’ll give you some questions, and some follow-up stuff, the usual, and you tell him that if he doesn’t answer right, I will do something bad.”

More silence. The soldier appears to be thinking, or trying to. Then he says: “Will you?”

“That depends how I’m feeling.”

“But you’re gonna kill him after, aren’t you.”

“What else do you expect me to do?” Rumlow says.

The soldier looks back down at the empty plates in front of him, and goes quiet. He looks furious now, which is also refreshingly normal. The room is silent except for the hum of the central heating.

Finally, he speaks. “I want to wait until tomorrow. My arm,” he adds, as if that’s a good reason.

“You don’t need your arm for what we’re gonna do, kid.” He doesn’t add that the soldier’s current pitiful appearance might actually be a bonus.

The soldier hunches over more, drawing into himself. When he answers, the words come out like they’re painful. “It still hurts.”

Rumlow sighs, leans over a little towards him. “Show it to me.”

The soldier looks up at him, confused.

“Your shoulder, idiot. I want to have a look. See how it’s going.”

It seems to take a moment for the words to sink in, but surprisingly, the soldier does not complain: he reaches up with his right hand, pulls at the dressings. They’d been on the verge of coming undone anyway, and it doesn’t take much effort to loosen the gauze and then slide the strips down off his shoulder, over the metal arm.

Of course, then he lets the dirty gauze fall to the floor. Figures.

Rumlow stands up, steps closer to where the soldier is sitting, and in front of him the soldier stiffens, his posture changing, staring straight ahead.

Oh. So that’s the reason he’d complied so quickly. He wanted to get the bandages off himself so that Rumlow wouldn’t try to do it himself. He’s fucked up about being touched there.

Rumlow holds up both palms to show he’s not going to touch him. The soldier’s reaction is so muted compared to yesterday that he is not exactly worried about getting close, but he still doesn’t want to deal with calming him down if it goes wrong. It works: the soldier stays still as Rumlow steps closer, still gazing off into nothing.

The surgical wound looks better than expected. Kind of gross, yes, in the way that newly healing wounds are, with tender-looking new pink skin everywhere. But the main incision has mostly closed, and the area above his shoulder has cleared up, the discoloration gone. Reyner, despite his faults, had apparently known what he was doing.

“Not bad,” Rumlow says.

No answer: the soldier’s still staring ahead like he’s trying to be somewhere else. It’s only when Rumlow goes back to the other side of the island that he seems to come back to himself, and even then it’s only to resume glaring at him. The soldier is very good at voicing complaints about his situation without actually saying anything, and he’s doing it very well right now.

“Fine,” Rumlow says. He has other shit to do before they’re ready to leave anyway, and it’s worth delaying a few hours if it means he won’t have to deal with the soldier being a bitch all day. “We can start later today. All right? Go rest until then. Stay out of my way.”

The soldier nods, which is close to an answer as he can expect.

 

 

Packing up to leave feels so close to old times that it’s almost comforting. He cleans and packs away most of his weapons, puts some laundry on. He goes to the basement briefly to bring the doctor some food, a task that is made less awkward by the fact that Reyner has decided to start simply pretending that Rumlow does not exist when he is in the room with him. That’s fine with him. Afterwards, back upstairs, he goes back through the doctor’s files for anything that might be useful for later. The idea is not just to ask Reyner for names—Rumlow already knows the names, for the most part—but to find out who, exactly, is currently compromised, and this is something the doctor should know better than most. Rumlow isn’t planning on trusting him blindly, obviously, but if Reyner really does feel sorry for the soldier and wants to keep him out of danger, there’s a good chance he’ll keep the information authentic.

When he’s done, he finds one of the protein shakes the doctor had mentioned during the surgery, and goes back upstairs to check on the soldier.

The curtains are drawn in the bedroom, and the room is stuffy and dim. The soldier has apparently taken a comforter off of a bed in one of the other bedrooms, because he is lying in the bed bundled up under a pile of covers that is even thicker than usual, as though the room is freezing. He doesn’t move at all until Rumlow is next to the bed. Rumlow holds out the little cardboard drink carton and waits, and after a moment the soldier reaches his right arm out from under the covers. 

“Uh-uh,” Rumlow says. “Left hand.”

The soldier scowls at him from where he’s lying, and then he makes a big show of bearing his teeth and grimacing as he turns over and starts to move the metal arm. But, as Rumlow had suspected, the supposed immobility is as much fear as it is actual pain: the soldier reaches out, slowly and stiffly, and takes the carton from Rumlow’s hand with no further theatrics. He sits up, holding the drink carefully.

“Think you can get the lid off by yourself?”

The soldier scowls some more, but manages to hold the carton steady and remove the little white plastic lid from the top. He lifts the container, the action still slow and cautious, and takes a sip.

“Good work,” Rumlow says. “Not so bad, is it?”

The soldier ignores him. His hair is wet, Rumlow notices, like he had taken another shower, even though he’d already had one earlier this morning.

Fucking weirdo.

He goes to the bathroom to take another pill—sure enough, the floor in there is all wet as well—and then heads back into the room to start packing up more. It’s clear outside today, and Rumlow only has to open the curtains a little for the glare from all the sun and the snow outside to light up the whole room. The soldier, still sitting up on the bed and now behind a haze of newly-visible dust motes, watches Rumlow as he starts picking up clothes from the floor.

“I’m gonna do more laundry,” Rumlow says, even though the soldier hadn’t asked. “Like always.”

The soldier takes another drink, stares at him silently. There’s another wet towel next to the bed, which, of course, the soldier has left there. It’s cold now, unpleasant to pick up, and Rumlow tosses it on the pile he’s making near the foot of the bed.

“You just like taking showers, don’t you?” he asks.

The soldier’s eyes widen a little; he tenses up as if Rumlow had threatened him.

Rumlow laughs. Okay, it makes sense: the soldier probably doesn’t have many positive experiences with someone asking him variations of the phrase you like that, don’t you.

“Hey, it’s okay,” he says. “I’m just talking. Making conversation. Someone’s gotta do it.”

The soldier does seem to relax a little, still staring at him, the mess of blankets bunched up at his hips.

“Pierce had a nice shower like that.”

Rumlow had been reaching down to pick up one of his empty carry bags. He straightens up: it takes a moment to assimilate both the inappropriateness of the sentence, and also what the hell the soldier might have actually meant. “You had a shower with Pierce?”

He regrets asking the question as soon as he asks it: it’s not something he actually wants an answer for. He’s content not knowing this particular piece of information about his old boss. And, of course, it's the one time the soldier is asked a question and then actually fucking answers.

“Not with him,” he says, like he is issuing a correction about something both important and extremely normal. “In his office. He had a shower in the bathroom there.”

When Rumlow doesn’t answer, because he’s staring at him blankly, the soldier goes on: “The hot water was good for me when my muscles got sore.”

Rumlow starts to laugh again, harder this time. It makes the cut on his face hurt, even with the pills kicking in, but he can’t stop.

The soldier straightens up a little, and then just sits there scowling, the way he always does whenever someone laughs at him.

“Christ,” Rumlow says finally, catching his breath. “Fuck. I mean, I figured the guy was doing weird shit when he was keeping you alone in his office, but telling you shit like that just to get you into the shower is weird as hell, even for—”

“It wasn’t like that,” the soldier snaps, cutting him off. “He never touched me.”

“What, like he just watched? Jerked off onto your hair?”

“It wasn’t like that,” the soldier says, as if it should be obvious, as if the idea of someone touching him was a bizarre idea. As if it hadn’t happened constantly.

“Okay. Sure.” Rumlow shrugs, and picks up the bag from the floor. It’ll work well enough for carrying the laundry downstairs, before he has to pack. “Don’t exactly matter much now, anyway, right? He’s dead.”

That works to cut short any more protest or complaining: the soldier falls silent, glaring. He looks angry, although also slightly confused, as if the concept of death is something he can’t quite understand, even though you’d think it was the one actual human experience he could grasp. The drink carton is still in his left hand, and as Rumlow starts shoving the laundry from the bed into his bag the soldier moves his hand in one quick, angry jerk, tossing the container off to the side. It’s nearly empty anyway, and the carton just hits a patch of bright carpet near the window with a hollow thud.

Rumlow doesn’t even flinch; by now, this sort of childishness isn’t a surprise. “Whatever,” he says. “I’m going downstairs. Lie down and rest.”

“Stay here,” the soldier says, quietly.

It’s enough to make Rumlow pause for half a second: it's unusual, the soldier just coming out and begging. At another time it might have been interesting, for entertainment purposes. But not now. He picks up the bag of dirty laundry.

The soldier has pushed back the piles of extra covers: he moves so he’s sitting at the edge of the bed. “Please,” he says.

Rumlow stops long enough to glance at him: the soldier looks like he is about to cry. He’s gotten himself all worked up about Pierce, and now he wants Rumlow to comfort him. Like it's not all his own fault. “No. Fuck off and do what you’re told.”

He turns away, about to head for the door, and then the soldier’s hand is on his arm.

Rumlow stops, looks down at it. The soldier is on his knees on the carpet, next to him already, so close and so fast. And his hand—his left hand—is wrapped firmly around Rumlow’s forearm, just above the wrist, the metal cold and solid.

For a moment Rumlow just stares down at it dumbly, before he looks back up at the soldier. It takes him a moment too long to get his voice together. “Let go,” he says.

“I don’t,” the soldier says. There are tears on his face, lit up in the golden winter sunlight from outside. “I don’t want to do it anymore.” His voice is low and shaky, the words too slow like he’s trying too hard to keep them steady.

“Let go,” Rumlow says. 

“The doctor,” the soldier says. “After. I can’t. I can’t do it anymore.”

Rumlow looks at him, and the soldier stares back. His face is flushed from the silent crying. Rumlow feels distant, like the floor under them isn’t real, like the pill he had taken is kicking in too hard and fast. When he does speak again, the words come out almost automatically, without thought. “You don’t have to kill him,” he says. “I told you that, idiot. You just have to—”

“After,” the soldier says. There are more tears now, his face twisting up; it looks like he’s in physical pain. His hand is still tight on Rumlow’s arm, metal pressing into his skin, squeezing flesh. “You’re going to make me do it after. I can’t—”

Rumlow slaps him, with the hand that’s still free. There’s no real thought behind it; it’s just the result of him getting his act together finally. The impact stings his the heel of his palm and makes a loud, satisfying noise, and the soldier’s head jerks to one side. Rumlow hits him again, harder, a closed fist this time. Another satisfying impact, bone against bone, the sound and the feel of it shining through the daze in his head.

When he lowers his fist the soldier’s head has dropped forward, hair hanging over his face. He’s breathing hard. He has not let go of Rumlow’s arm.

“I’m still in charge,” Rumlow says. He finds that his free hand is still curled in a fist at his side, but he still doesn’t try to pull his other arm away.

The soldier looks up again. His nose is bleeding, the side of his face dark red from the slap. He sniffs, and then slumps forward toward him, finally letting go of Rumlow’s forearm. Pushes his face against Rumlow’s stomach, and his left arm wraps around Rumlow's waist now, hand at the small of his back.

Rumlow stands there, lets him. He feels out of breath himself, like he’d just run for a long distance, instead of just punching someone. The soldier’s forehead is pressed against his abdomen, and he can feel the wetness of tears or blood where it’s seeping through his t-shirt.

“Stay here,” he hears the soldier say again, muffled against him. “Please.”

Rumlow looks down at him. The weight of the soldier’s hand is firm and heavy on his lower back, and he feels heavy everywhere, like he’s being pulled down in deep water. He is tired, and his knee hurts anyway, and so he moves, stepping sideways so he can move past the soldier, who lets Rumlow slide out of his grasp. He sits down on the edge of the mattress, in the space where the soldier had pushed back all of the covers. The mattress creaks under the new weight.

The soldier’s there again, immediately, still on his knees and next to him now, head resting on the top of his thigh, arm curled around his leg. 

It feels better to be off his feet, at least. His body still feels so heavy, and maybe it’s from all the extra pain he’s been dragging around all morning or just from the burden of the soldier slumped on him like a dead weight. Rumlow can smell the blood on him, feel more of it soaking into the fabric of his pants.

“You’re disgusting,” Rumlow says. “You’re bleeding everywhere.”

No answer, just more shaky breathing, the soldier’s hand clutching tighter at him.

God, he’s tired. Sitting down is not so bad.

“Okay,” Rumlow says. “It’s okay.”

 

Chapter 15

 

It’s only when the soldier starts clutching at him tighter like he wants something that Rumlow finally pushes him away.

“You don’t get to do this shit and then think you can make it better just by sucking my dick or whatever,” he says. “You’re not even that good at it.”

The soldier stares up at him, looking barely aware both of what Rumlow had said and the blood covering half of his face. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“Shut up. You’re exhausting.” Still, he doesn’t stand up. It seems like too much effort: his body feels like he is drunk and in need of a comfortable surface to crash on.

If only. He lies down onto the bed, on his back, kicking away the heavy pile of blankets. Closes his eyes briefly like it can block out his mood. The sheets are still warm from where the soldier had been lying on them. The pillow smells faintly like soap. God, he’s tired.

But the soldier is still there, obviously, and when Rumlow opens his eyes he is still looking up at him from next to the bed, miserable, like a dog that’s been locked outside in the cold. Rumlow sighs, beckons with his chin. “Fine. Get up here.”

He does, quickly, and despite what he’d said before Rumlow starts unbuckling his belt, because sex is a better option than anything else that might work to shut the soldier up right now.

“Just your hand,” he says as he undoes his pants. “Your face is a mess, I don’t want it near me.”

The soldier nods. There’s a moment, one which might have been amusing if Rumlow had been in a better mood, in which he tries to figure out a position that will work with his injured shoulder, but then he turns, crawling down closer to the foot of the bed, and Rumlow shifts his legs apart so that the soldier can climb between them. He sits down there, legs folded up under him, and Rumlow watches from his vantage point on the pillow and ignores the pain still throbbing through his bruised forearm as the soldier leans forward over him, left hand resting on the top of Rumlow’s clothed thigh, and then the soldier's right hand is on his bare skin, warm, the skin too rough.

Rumlow takes his eyes off him, and the ceiling is in focus above him, the golden sunlight cutting through the shadows in the room.

He has had some decent handjobs from the soldier in the past, in places far less accommodating than a spacious bed in a warm room, but this isn’t one of those. It’s nothing that the soldier is doing wrong—he is making an effort, bent over him deeper now with his head down near the top of Rumlow’s left thigh like he wants to be as close as he’s allowed—but none of it is doing much. His forearm hurts. His head still feels fuzzy, like he’s lost blood. He is barely fully hard.

But the most distracting part is the feeling as if he’s been here before, somehow, in the past, with the soldier clinging to him like this, and whatever it is exactly, it is not a good memory and none of it is helpful right now.

It’s mostly for the sake of distraction that he reaches down to touch the soldier’s head, pushing aside some of the hair that’s fallen over his face. The soldier exhales, ducks his head down even deeper so that his hair brushes against Rumlow’s hip, near his unbuckled belt, his hand keeping up its steady movement on Rumlow’s cock. It does work as a distraction, how much the soldier enjoys it, and it’s something to calm the soldier down, at least, and so Rumlow keeps stroking his head. The soldier's hair is still damp from the shower, the skin of his scalp surprisingly warm underneath his fingertips. Rumlow moves his hand down near the base of his skull, rubs his thumb and index finger gently down over the suboccipital muscles, down to the back of his neck. It’s something the soldier usually likes, but this time when Rumlow’s hand moves lower the soldier tenses up, his hand losing its rhythm.

Rumlow lifts his head off the pillow. “What is it?”

No answer: the soldier just turns his head away like he doesn’t want to look at him. But it’s obvious already, from the way the soldier holding himself like he’s trying not to shrink back, from the way he’d acted this morning.

The soldier is still freaked out about anyone coming near his shoulder, and if there’s anything that is going to put Rumlow in even less of a mood, it’s the thought of the soldier acting anything like he did yesterday. He grabs a handful of the soldier’s hair and pulls upwards, towards him. Not too quickly, so the soldier has a chance to move on his own instead of getting yanked up by the hair, but the soldier still winces dramatically as he ends up on all fours above Rumlow, fumbling to steady himself, ending up slumped slightly to one side to keep most of his weight off his bad arm.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Rumlow says up at him. He’s still got a fistful of his hair: he pulls on it, lightly, to emphasize the question. “You let people fuck around with your arm all the time.”

“I’m sorry,” the soldier says. His face is shadowed with the light from the window, still smeared with drying blood.

“It’s almost better now. What’s your problem?”

“I’m sorry,” he says again instead of answering.

Rumlow rolls his eyes, lets go of the soldier’s hair. The soldier can sulk all he wants; he’s too tired for this. “Whatever,” he says. “We’re done for now. Get off me.” He pushes the soldier aside—the soldier lets him do it, of course, and the fact that he has to let him do it is as annoying as anything else—and starts to sit up.

“Wait,” the soldier says. He is sitting up on the bare sheets next to him, his shoulders hunched, looking tense and miserable.

“Shut up.” Rumlow says. He starts doing up his pants: it still takes him longer than it should because of his hand, and that just makes him even more irritated. He’s going to go find a drink before he starts packing again.

“You can,” the soldier says from next to him on the bed, and then stops. His voice is flat. It takes him a second to finish the sentence, like he has to try very hard to force out the words. He swallows and then says. “You can—touch me. I’m sorry.”

“You had your chance, kid.”

“Please,” the soldier says.

Rumlow stops, because he’d gotten a look at his face as he was about to actually stand up, and of course that had been a mistake, because the soldier is so damn good at looking pitiful.

Not that pitiful is really enough to describe how he looks right now. The soldier looks miserable, yes, but also utterly furious with himself: his face is flushed with anger, his left hand clenched tight into a fist, his eyes not quite meeting Rumlow’s even as he looks at him.

If the soldier had just been plain begging, nothing about the way he is acting right now would have been particularly tempting. But that anger—to be honest, that makes Rumlow’s dick way more interested than it had been so far.

“I’m sorry,” the soldier says again, his voice dull, still not quite looking at him. He takes another forcibly steadied breath. “Please.”

Rumlow actually feels himself smile. He settles back down, back against the headboard now, and reaches his hand out, the same one that had been in the soldier’s hair. The soldier leans forward a little towards it, although it’s obvious that he doesn’t want to.

Rumlow says: “You not going to freak out like yesterday?”

The soldier shakes his head, and honestly the question hadn’t even been necessary: the soldier might look angry and scared right now, might still be fucked up in the head about his arm for whatever stupid reason, but he’s still here; he is still present. The full-on craziness from yesterday just is not there.

“Here,” Rumlow says, settling back a bit more, pulling the soldier closer by the hair—slow, gentle enough so that he can move by himself, just like before. “Just your hand again,” he adds as the soldier folds himself forward, leaning down over him again, his left arm folded up against his body, the mattress creaking under them as his weight shifts. It’s a bit awkward, this new angle, but the soldier gets Rumlow’s pants open again and then his dick is in his hand, and that’s what matters.

The changed position, sitting up a bit with the soldier on the bed next to him on his right side, allows Rumlow a much closer look at his left shoulder: the skin along the length of the incisions is flushed dark pink, the scarring vivid and ugly, but the cuts themselves have mostly closed up. Just one or two places at the front where the edges of the wounds are still pulled apart, not quite healed. The doctor hadn’t used sutures.

The soldier keeps stroking him, firm, up and down and not too fast, as Rumlow touches him first on the jaw, stroking along the rough skin there with his thumb, then down across his throat. He doesn’t take it slow, after that: just trails his hand across the warm skill until he reaches the soldier’s shoulder.

The soldier’s right hand stutters, but doesn’t stop moving on him. Rumlow is touching him just with his fingertips, with no pressure, nothing that could cause any pain, even on a new scar. He traces along the seam of the metal arm, and the soldier stiffens slightly but keeps quiet.

“There, see?” Rumlow says. “Best to just face this stuff head on.”

The soldier nods. He is tense all over, visible in the muscles in his back. This shouldn’t be a big deal for him—Rumlow touches him all the time, all over the place—but it clearly is, and Rumlow is hard now, and his head finally feels clear. For the first time since he entered this room, maybe for the first time since he woke up this morning, he doesn’t have the urge to be somewhere else.

And there’s always more to push for. There is that area right at the front of his shoulder, near the clavicle, where the incisions have healed up the least, where the wounds are still open. When Rumlow touches him there he doesn't push hard enough to hurt, but the soldier cringes: there’s no other word for it. His breath falters; he breathes like he's in pain. His hand keeps up its repeating pulse of movement. Rumlow is moving with him now, the soldier's hand keeping in time with him, a steady band of pleasure.

“Look at me,” Rumlow says and the soldier does, not meeting his eye. Despite what Rumlow is doing, and despite all of the earlier dramatics, the look on his face is still nothing like the blank, lost terror from yesterday. Instead, it’s an expression that Rumlow is far more accustomed to: a sort of familiar, angry helplessness. The soldier might be miserable, but he is still there, as much as he might not want to be.

When Rumlow pushes down and digs his fingers in, just a bit, the soldier moans loud and sudden like he’s been stabbed, and just hearing that is like an electric shock, all through his whole body.

“Shh.” Rumlow says. The soldier’s hand has stopped moving, although he has maintained a decent grip—Rumlow’s just fucking his hand now, but it's all so good to see that it doesn't matter. “Does that hurt?”

“Please,” the soldier says. His hand is so tight around him still, every part of him strained, taut: he is looking past Rumlow into nothing, his eyes distant, fuzzy. He might still be here, but he must still remember. Remember something, at least, even if the actual memory isn’t there. Some pain, some metal gripping him, carving him open. Segmenting muscle, splitting bone.

And yet—he stays still, his right hand still gripped around him as Rumlow pushes up into it, no part of him drawing away even as Rumlow’s fingers dig deeper into the fractured skin. Taking it, working through it like he had worked through the gagging last night. Would probably still keep taking it, even if Rumlow pushed down to the bone.

“I’m sorry,” the soldier says, his voice low, and Rumlow sees him breathing in deep, trying to get enough air to talk. “You can do whatever you want, please, I love you, you can—”

“Fuck,” Rumlow hears himself say, and then he barely has time to grab the soldier’s hair again and shove his head down onto his dick before he comes in his mouth.

It lasts a long time, and the soldier helps him through it, takes him down, his mouth at the base of his cock, smearing tears and blood all over his skin. Rumlow’s hips still want to move up into him even after he should be finished, after he’s emptied himself.

Rumlow holds him there for longer than he would have thought possible, until his senses calm down and he can hear himself gasping, feel the cold air on his wet skin, on his shirt where the soldier's blood has cooled there. Even as he finally releases his grip on the soldier’s hair, his dick twitches again, like it wants to stay there.

“Damn,” he says as the soldier pulls away, starts to sit up. “That—that was better than I expected, I’ll give you that.”

The soldier doesn’t answer. Sitting up next to him on the bed now, covering his bad shoulder with his right hand, his eyes pink, breathing deep. It’s the only sound in the quiet room.

“I’m gonna shower,” Rumlow says. “Do you need one?”

No answer.

“At least clean your face, all right,” Rumlow says. The soldier doesn't answer.

Rumlow shrugs, gets up. There’s more blood on him than he had realized, cold on his skin as he moves. The soldier doesn’t seem to notice that Rumlow is moving, focusing off into nothing.

 

 

It really is a nice shower, at least. He takes his time in there, and after a minute or so the soldier does come into the bathroom, where he washes his face at the sink, rinses his mouth out, then leaves. That level of functionality is actually a good sign, and since the soldier has also presumably gotten his tantruming out of the way now, maybe he won’t cause more delays before they leave. If that’s the case, they haven’t even lost that much time.

Maybe it’s just better to let this shit come to a head, sometimes. Rumlow sure as hell feels better now, in any case, despite all the earlier stuff that is not relevant to think about now.

There are no dry towels again when he gets out, but he’s used to that.

When he comes out of the bathroom, having dried himself off as much as he can with the cleaner parts of his old t-shirt, the soldier is still there, sitting on the edge of the bed.

He looks up at Rumlow. His left arm is still held a little awkwardly against him, like it’s in pain, but he looks calm enough, and relatively normal, for him. And he has managed to fully dress himself, and even put on shoes, so that’s another good sign.

Rumlow picks out some of the clean clothing he’d put in his main bag before, and sits down on the bed next to him to get dressed.

The room is silent, the warm air heavy around them. Rumlow’s arm brushes against the soldier’s right hand as he leans down to put his boots on: the soldier’s skin feels cold again.

“You still feeling sick?” he says as he starts tying the boots.

The soldier doesn’t answer, sitting there like a lump of ice.

“You’re cold,” Rumlow prompts.

Still no answer. The soldier hasn’t even moved, really.

Rumlow finishes tying his boots, straightens up. “What’s wrong?”

Silence, of course, but—it’s not the lack of answering that’s the issue. It is something else, something it had taken Rumlow a minute to pick up on, because he hadn’t been looking for it this time. The soldier has the same look about him that he had had last night, back when he had known he had done something wrong and was in trouble. That same scared-dog look, hiding behind behind a mask of excessive composure.

“Soldier,” Rumlow says, louder now. “What the fuck.”

No answer. The room around them feels cold all of a sudden, as cold as the soldier’s skin. As cold as the room they had been in together, yesterday.

Rumlow could hit him, to get him to answer, but he doesn’t. Maybe he can’t. He doesn’t even feel like he is really here.

“What happened,” he says, quiet, steady. “Fucking tell me.”

The soldier looks at him, that weird, formal blankness still on his face.

“The doctor,” he says. His voice is flat, matter-of-fact, as if he is reciting an order. “I let him go.”

 

 

 

Chapter 16

 

 

Rumlow might be young, and still relatively new at this job, but he’s smart enough to realize that this is a test.

He’s supposed to take the soldier up to see Pierce, which involves traveling to the top floor of the hotel whose underground levels they are currently occupying. It is a ridiculously short trip: technically inside the same building, for god’s sake. All you need to do is walk down a few corridors, go to the private elevator, put in the codes for the correct floor, go up. The soldier could easily get there himself. Rumlow might not have worked with the soldier much yet, but even he knows that.

And more importantly, if the soldier decides he doesn’t want to go there, it’s not like Rumlow can physically stop him.

But Rumlow still agrees to do it, without argument, even though he is too new to figure out the exact reasoning behind it, even though he is jet-lagged and dead on his feet after the mission. He makes it to the elevator, puts the code he’d been given into the old metal keypad, waits as the elevator creaks to life and begins to ascend. Next to him, the soldier does what he has been doing from the beginning, which is ignoring Rumlow completely.

He is fine with that. The interior of the elevator is small—the hotel they’re hiding out under is not exactly a new building—and next to him the soldier smells like smoke and gunshot residue, strong in the confined space. Rumlow thinks he smells blood, as well. He definitely knows there’s a few people's blood on him.

When they reach the top floor and the doors slide open, the soldier steps forward immediately, and Rumlow has to duck sideways to avoid being knocked out of the way by the larger man’s metal shoulder.

He straightens himself and follows, trying to recoup his dignity.

A bored-looking armed guard is blocking the doorway between the entranceway and the hotel suite beyond it, and he glances at the soldier before stepping aside. He does not acknowledge Rumlow at all.

Okay. So Rumlow is about as useful as a literal child right now, and no one is even pretending otherwise. But at least this is almost over: he can see Pierce already, seated at a table near the back of the room.

It’s not usually a relief to catch sight of Pierce, but given Rumlow’s current company? Today is an exception.

“Come in,” Pierce calls without taking his eyes off the newspaper that is open in his hands. Glaring sunlight is coming in through the bank of tall windows behind him, a view of a hazy sky and the tops of a few other buildings outside. Rumlow had forgotten that it was morning.

There’s another guard of some sort in here, standing next to another door at the side of the room, watching as they approach. That’s good, he supposes: it’s not like this place is lacking in manpower and backup. Pierce will take note of the fact that Rumlow was able to handle this task, and will send him back downstairs, and then Rumlow can have a shower and lie down somewhere. Maybe even get some sleep, if he’s lucky.

“Sit down,” Pierce says when they reach the table, still not looking up. The soldier sits, taking the chair opposite Pierce at the wooden table.

Rumlow stays standing, waiting to be dismissed from the room, and Pierce finally raises his eyes from the newspaper.

“You too, Mr. Rumlow,” he says.

Fuck, Rumlow thinks.

He pulls back the empty seat at the end of the table between the other two men, barely knowing what he is doing. A test involving transporting the soldier was at least a familiar danger, a momentary one. A test involving interacting with Pierce? That is an entirely different story. And with the soldier here as well…

Still, he sits. Pierce is still reading his paper. A discreet check over his own shoulder confirms to Rumlow that the guard he’d seen on the way in has moved to block the doorway that they had entered the room through. Next to Rumlow, the soldier is sitting silently, looking past Pierce out of the window, like Rumlow is not even there. That could change quickly, though. He has seen that change quickly.

He takes a breath, tries to exhale quietly, calm himself a little without making it obvious that he’s not already calm. Whatever Pierce wants from him, whatever is going to happen—there is nothing much Rumlow can do about it at this point. All he can do is deal with the situation, stay in control as much as he can. He can do that.

A few seconds later, Pierce finally lowers the paper, folding it and setting it down on the wooden surface of the table in front of him. “I was about to start breakfast,” he says to Rumlow, like this is a normal conversation, like there are not two armed guards visibly blocking the exits and an assassin sitting next to them. “You two must be hungry.”

Rumlow is not hungry, not now. On the plus side, at least he is not tired anymore. Sudden mortal terror is a good way to wake a guy up.

Pierce, regardless, doesn’t wait for an answer; he signals to the guard standing closer to the table, who turns and exits through the side door. A few seconds later, he re-enters the room, his hands full: he starts laying out place settings on the table while Rumlow watches, dazed. The man leaves his field of vision, and then a minute later returns with food, setting out plates in the middle of the table, between Rumlow and the soldier and Pierce, who watches with a relaxed, pleasant expression like this is all completely normal, like it is just another meal. Maybe it is just another meal, for him.

“Tea?” Pierce says.

The man is somehow pouring it already; Rumlow hadn’t noticed the little glass cup being put in front of him. He doesn’t answer, but the man serves him some anyway.

“Help yourself,” Pierce says. “There’s plenty of food.”

“I’m not hungry, sir,” Rumlow says.

Pierce looks annoyed.

Fuck, Rumlow thinks again.

Thankfully the annoyance doesn’t last, or perhaps Pierce simply files the error away for later. In any case, Pierce starts busying himself putting food onto his own and the soldier’s plate: bread, cheese, olives. The man who had served them the food has already resumed his position blocking one of the two exit points from the room.

When Pierce has finished serving his own plate, he says: “So how did it go last night?”

It takes Rumlow half a second to figure out that Pierce is still talking to him. “Good,” he manages to say. His mouth feels dry. He clears his throat. "Well. It went well."

“What about Davis? You enjoy working with him?”

“Yes, sir.”

A few more questions follow, asking his thoughts on various mechanics of the mission. Rumlow answers automatically, barely conscious of what he is saying, and after a minute or two Pierce nods like he’s satisfied, takes a bite of his food.

Rumlow’s head is—he can hardly think. The questions had seemed genuine, and he doesn’t know why Pierce would ask for opinions on Hydra operations if he is just planning on killing him, or doing something close to it. Why not just get on with it? And what’s with the food?

The seconds drag. Steam is moving up from the cup of tea sitting in front of him, slow as a ghost. On his other side, the soldier is eating, slowly, methodically, but at a steady pace that makes Rumlow think that he must be starving. He knows he should attempt to eat too, to be polite, but he isn’t certain that he would be able to hold it down.

Finally Pierce sets down his own utensils, and then reaches over the table again and serves more food to the soldier. The soldier pauses momentarily, then starts eating again without so much as a nod of acknowledgement.

Pierce doesn’t seem to mind this. He leans back in his chair and then says: “And what do you think, soldier? I’ve heard Mr. Rumlow has been standing out somewhat. Has he been treating you well?”

The soldier stops eating long enough to glance at Rumlow, then back to Pierce, and says nothing.

Pierce clicks his tongue, irritated. “Soldier,” he says again.

“Yes,” the soldier says. It’s the first time Rumlow has heard him speak since before the sun came up.

Pierce nods like it’s a detailed answer. He reaches out to pick up another piece of bread, takes a bite, and then settles back again in his chair again, watching as the soldier finishes his food. He looks deep in thought, like he’s carefully appraising something. There is some element that Rumlow doesn’t like in Pierce’s expression, on top of all the other things he already doesn’t like right now; some bright edge of gratification that does not seem justified in the current situation.

Rumlow’s whole body is starting to hurt from how tense he is. The room is quiet, enough to hear the faint sounds of traffic from the street below, off in another world.

“Soldier,” Pierce says finally, after the soldier has finished. His voice is calm. “Why don’t you stand up for a second now, and help me out with Mr. Rumlow.”

In the corner of his eye, Rumlow sees the soldier finally lift his head, then turn to look at him.

“Nothing too small,” Pierce continues amiably. “But nothing that will cripple him. Your choice, you can—”

Rumlow doesn’t hear the rest, because he’s already pushing himself up, his chair thudding back onto the carpeted floor as he moves to get away—but it doesn’t matter, of course; the soldier is already on his feet too, and the soldier is quicker.

And the fact that Rumlow is standing up just makes it worse, because it just means that he gets slammed hard onto his back on the ground before the soldier’s weight is on him. He is pinned, the soldier has a hold of Rumlow’s left hand and—

Rumlow screams. The pain is there before he can even tell what is happening: tearing, breaking, bone splitting. Rumlow twists, out of control with the pain, the weight above him still pressing down, the smell of blood and metal. He’s clutching his broken left hand with his right one, gasping for air, already curled up on his side before he’s aware he’s no longer being restrained. He can hear his own screaming in his ears.

The soldier is already on his feet again, above him, and apparently no other orders have been given by Pierce, because he just sits back down at the table, leaving Rumlow still on the floor, the side of his face pressed against the rough carpet.

They are not going to kill him. Not yet, anyway.

Off to one side, he hears Pierce make an appreciative comment, either to the soldier or the guards; Rumlow can’t make out the words. He has regained enough of a hold on himself now to make some effort to steady his breathing, and he forces himself to sit up. Getting to his feet involves letting go of his injured hand to steady himself; the movement is enough to make his stomach turn with the pain. He’s surprised to not see any blood; a part of him had thought that the soldier had actually ripped a few of his fingers off.

He catches sight of Pierce as he gets himself fully upright; his boss’s face is lit up as bright as the window behind him. He watches, looking satisfied, as Rumlow drags himself back to the table, because that's what seems to be expected of him.

Somehow, none of the food or drink on the table had spilled. Rumlow sits down, stares vaguely in Pierce’s direction, cradling his injured left hand. The room has turned too warm, his whole body shaky from the pain. He can tell, somehow, just from Pierce’s expression, that it’s not over. Of course it's not over.

“He likes you,” Pierce says to him, nodding, like he expects Rumlow to be pleased. “He didn’t even go for a forearm, or a leg.”

Rumlow can’t answer. The pain is still there, of course, but the initial wave of it has died down enough now that his mind can piece together what had happened physically. The side of his hand is what is broken: the soldier had snapped the whole outer edge of his palm inward. It's a burning line of agony that radiates, somehow, right down into his wrist, feverish heat through his whole body.

The guards at the doors had not even moved when it happened. Rumlow had not been enough of a threat for them to bother.

Pierce smiles, and goes on. “And he even hesitated. I saw it. He must like you a lot.”

Rumlow doesn’t answer. It sure hadn’t felt like he had hesitated.

Pierce makes another approving noise. Then he leans forward to serve more food onto the soldier’s plate, like he’s rewarding him.

Rumlow sits still, trying to control the shaking that’s starting to spread worse through his body. Pierce is still watching him, he knows, and he tries to get himself calm, but he knows it won’t last. It will only last as long as Pierce wants it to.

He had tried to run. He had panicked, he had screamed. He will scream again if it happens again, which it might, because Pierce looks too happy with himself for this to truly be done.

So much for staying in control. He wants to go back and punch himself for thinking that plan was realistic. Of course he was never in control here. Not at all.

“You don’t look well, Mr. Rumlow,” Pierce says. “Have some of your tea.”

Rumlow doesn’t have a choice. He tentatively lets go of his injured hand again. Despite all his efforts, the other hand is trembling, visibly. He picks up the small glass. He can barely lift it without spilling it. He’s sweating. The pain is making him want to vomit.

“You know,” Pierce is saying now, “Back in the middle ages, before people had the methods of record-keeping that we have now, men in villages used to teach their sons to recognize the boundaries of their lands by taking them out to the boundary markers, and whipping the boys there.”

Rumlow has finally managed to lift the glass, and he takes a drink of the lukewarm liquid. Everything else feels far away, like the pain is enough to create its own dimension. His injured hand is lying in his lap; he can feel the spreading pulse of the inflammation, blood and fluid seeping into places it shouldn’t be, the pain deepening and spreading.

“The idea is that the pain would make memories more vivid,” Pierce goes on. “So that the children would remember those important pieces of information for their whole lives. It seems they all knew, even back then, that pain was an effective way to make things stick. What do you think, Mr. Rumlow?”

Rumlow can’t answer. He just stares, still holding the half-empty glass. An assassin had just knocked him to the ground and snapped his hand in two like it was a fucking Kit-Kat bar, and now Pierce is asking him questions about history-class bullshit?

The pain, the ridiculousness of all of it, is settling into a tightness in his chest, distilling down into low, targetless rage.

“You’re right,” Pierce says after a moment, apparently interpreting Rumlow’s silence as contemplative skepticism. “Sometimes I question whether that method of learning really does work as advertised, especially when it comes to our friend here. Still,” he adds brightly, “You’re welcome to have your own go at it now, if you’d like, Mr. Rumlow. Similar conditions—you can choose what to do, but don’t put our friend out of commission.”

It takes a second for Rumlow to decipher what Pierce is saying, with the way everything is going in his head.

“Go ahead,” Pierce prompts. “He won’t fight back, not if he has been told not to. Isn’t that right, soldier?”

“Yes,” the soldier says flatly.

Rumlow looks at him, then back at Pierce. He doesn’t move.

“Don’t be scared, son,” Pierce says. “He’s all yours.”

Rumlow looks back again at the soldier, who is sitting slumped slightly in the chair. His right hand is resting near the edge of the table, the same hand that the soldier had just used on him. He’s not looking at Rumlow. Like he’s once again ignoring the fact that Rumlow is even there.

The image of hurting him rushes through Rumlow’s mind like a breath of fresh air, like a sudden focus for all the disparate anger through his body. All the stuff he could do, all the options. Getting to choose what to do. Right here.

While Pierce sits and watches.

Rumlow exhales and sets down his glass carefully back on the table. “No thank you.”

There’s a pause as Pierce frowns, leaning back in his chair again. “Are you sure? I can assure you, it’s quite safe. He always follows orders around me.”

“I’m sure,” Rumlow says.

“Come on,” Pierce says. “You might as well.”

Rumlow looks back at the soldier, who is still sitting there staring off past Pierce like he is thinking about something else.

Pierce might kill Rumlow after this; this might be the last chance Rumlow ever gets to hit back, and god he would indeed like to hurt him right now. But he can still tell, with the part of himself that is not currently itching to murder everyone in the room, that although he is being offered an imitation of it, he won’t actually be in control. Not really.

And he is not going to spend what are potentially the last few minutes of his life playing fight club for Alexander Pierce next to a breakfast table.

“No, thank you,” he says again.

Pierce frowns again, but then looks at him with genuine curiosity. “And why is that?”

“You said it was my choice.”

Pierce continues to look at him, carefully. Rumlow doesn’t move. For the first time since he was sent up here, he actually feels certain about something. Even if it is something that might kill him.

“Yes,” Pierce says finally, sounding thoughtful. “Choice is a good thing to have, isn’t it.”

“Yes,” Rumlow says.

More silence. Rumlow gets the feeling again of something building behind Pierce’s calm expression, about to snap, about to come out with noise and violence and more pain...

But then Pierce just smiles, breaking the tension with a movement forward, leaning over to clap a friendly hand on Rumlow’s shoulder. It’s sudden and unexpected enough that he doesn’t brace for it, and the impact that jolts his broken hand makes him bite back a scream.

“All right then, Mr. Rumlow,” Pierce says. “Come on. Let’s get you back downstairs, you need to get that hand looked at. You stay here, soldier,” he adds offhandedly, starting to stand up.

Rumlow stands as well, automatically, follows him just as automatically. It’s not until the two of them are almost out of the room, the guards waved aside, that he starts to realize that it is over, that he had passed the test, whatever it was. That he is not going to die in a foreign hotel room and have his body disposed of in a service elevator.

Pierce’s hand is back on his shoulder as his boss pushes the button to call the elevator, the touch gentler now, painless.

The door slides open, and Pierce gives his shoulder a little squeeze, still light enough that it barely hurts.

“Just be careful, Mr. Rumlow,” Pierce says, very close to him now, friendly, cheerful. He inclines his head back toward the room they had just left, indicating who he is talking about, and keeps smiling. “You never know as much about what he’s learned as you think you do.”

 

 

 

Chapter 17

 

After maybe half an hour of driving, when he can’t stand to wait anymore, Rumlow stops the car at the first good location he sees. There’s no one around for miles, just trees and snow and the narrow stretch of road, and there’s enough good space on the side to pull over. He turns off the engine, gets out, goes around to the passenger side.

The soldier doesn’t resist when Rumlow pulls him out of the car, just lets him do it, which somehow just makes him angrier.

Rumlow has been sensible up until now. He had stopped himself from doing the many things he’d wanted to do, had concentrated on getting himself and the soldier out of the house first. He had ignored the soldier’s attempts at explanation. He had put some physical distance between the two of them and the last place the doctor had seen them. But he can’t keep all that going right now.

He has the soldier by the back of the neck, the skin warm under his grip. It’s cold, and the wind is biting into the skin on his face, painful against the still-healing cut on his brow. He shoves the soldier forward, away from the car, past the first layers of bare trees. As soon as they’re out of sight of the road, Rumlow lets go of his neck, and then hits him.

It’s a good punch, enough to genuinely knock the soldier off balance for a second, or at least enough to make him put some good effort into faking it. Rumlow hits him again, and this time the soldier actually staggers back a little.

He’s bleeding already, red dripping along his chin and down his front, and it’s good, it all feels so natural. Simple, almost like being his old self again. He grabs the soldier by the hair, pulls him down onto his knees in the snow, and then kicks him hard, right under the rib cage on his right side. The soldier yells, loud in the outdoor silence, and this time his reaction actually does seem real, and that’s even better. Rumlow kicks him again, in the same place, once more and then in the stomach, and the soldier goes down, curling up on his side. He groans pitifully, his face hidden in his hair.

“Get up,” Rumlow says, and the soldier does it, or at least tries to, and Rumlow grabs his hair again to hurry him up—there’s clumps of snow on it now, cold under his fingers. He pulls him the rest of the way back up onto his knees, and the soldier slumps in his grip, his teeth bared, sucking in cold air. Rumlow raises his other hand to hit him again.

“I won’t be able to walk,” the soldier coughs out.

“What?”

“I won’t be able to walk,” he says again. He’s gasping between words, his breathing harsh, but he’s not begging: he talks as if he's just reminding Rumlow of a useful piece of information he might have forgotten. “You need me to be able get back to the car, I need to—”

“Shut up,” Rumlow says.

Surprisingly, the soldier does. He scowls, clenching his jaw, and stares down at the ground in front of him, still breathing hard.

Rumlow raises his hand again, and the soldier just kneels there, unmoving. It’s quiet, empty around them except for the snow and the dead-looking trees, and Rumlow can already see all of this play out. He can beat the soldier to a pulp. He can force him to do whatever he wants. He can do everything he can think of. It won’t achieve anything. It won’t make any fucking difference.

The moment is gone. The rest of the world is already rushing back in: the sweat cooling on Rumlow's skin, the pain in his hand and his face, the lengthening shadows around them. The soldier, still silent in front of him. A bit of blood is still dripping from his face, dark against the shadowy grey snow on the ground.

“Just get back in the fucking car,” Rumlow says, and turns back towards the road.

 

 

It takes a minute for the soldier to pull himself together enough to follow him back to the vehicle, long enough for Rumlow to search for and find the bottle of pills in one of the bags on the back seat. He’d managed to grab the bottle on their way out of the house, as well as a few of the bags he’d packed, but not much else.

He swallows a couple of pills while standing next to the car, resting one arm against the top of the open driver-side door, the metal cold against his skin. He shoves the pill bottle into his pocket and then lets himself close his eyes for a few seconds. It had been stupid to even stop here, of course. He’s losing it.

After a moment, he gets back into the car. The soldier is already back in the passenger seat, hunched over a bit. He’s holding his left shoulder, even though it’s his face that looks like it hurts more. He doesn’t speak as Rumlow gets in.

“Whatever they did to you, I wish they’d done it more,” Rumlow says. “Maybe something useful would have stuck.”

No answer. Most of the mess on his face is coming from a cut near his eye, which is still bleeding impressively. It’s not satisfying to look at, though. It doesn’t even feel like he was the one who did it. He feels… light. But not in a good way. It’s as if without the feeling of cold on his skin, everything else might start to disappear.

He ignores it. The important thing right now is moving, because the more distance between them and the doctor the better. Rumlow starts the engine, and the car’s heating blasts on, loud. It takes a second to get moving because of the snow, but he successfully pulls the car back out onto the road.

The sun is already getting low, a glare in his eyes between the bare trees. His head hurts. The inside of the car smells like blood. His hand hurts where he has to grip it too tight on the wheel, because everything still feels light and too far away. It’s okay. He keeps driving.

After a period of time that might be five minutes, or thirty, he hears the soldier speak next to him. “You should slow down.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Rumlow says.

“The roads aren’t clear enough to go this fast.”

Rumlow laughs. He can’t help it, it just happens. “And why d’you think I might need to go this fast, soldier? You think maybe there’s a reason behind that?”

“I told you already,” the soldier says. “Reyner’s not going to tell anyone where we were. He told me he wouldn’t.”

“And you fucking believed him.”

“He was Hydra too. He doesn’t want to get caught any more than we do.”

He hears himself laugh again, louder this time. “And you think he can’t get a deal if he turns us in? You really think he wouldn’t do that? Did you maybe consider just how much he hates me?”

No answer. Presumably, the soldier is scowling at him.

Rumlow presses on the accelerator, grips down on the wheel so hard that the pain shoots down into his bones. It should be grounding, but he still feels far away. “The doctor was acting nice to you so you would let him go, you moron. Are you seriously too stupid to realize that?”

“I’m not—”

“What, you thought he was like Pierce? On your side?”

From the corner of his eye he sees the soldier looking at him, and there is an edge of something like confusion, and Rumlow keeps going because it's something to latch onto, the words coming out as fast and natural as the scenery slipping past around them. “You do know that Pierce used to arrange all the shit that happened, right? Everything they used to do to you? ”

No answer. The soldier is still looking at him from the passenger side. Rumlow keeps his eyes on the road, which is darker now that it’s approaching dusk, a line of fast-moving ink under the glow of the headlights, snow on either side. “What, you think all that was just random? You think anyone could have so much as touched you without Pierce’s approval? Pierce wanted it to happen. All of it.”

More silence. The soldier is just scowling, the way he always does when he’s processing new information, and it should be enough to be satisfying, but it’s not. “I always thought he filmed it and then watched it later, or some shit. I don’t know. Maybe he just got off on knowing it was happening. But he did it, he let that shit happen, because he hated you.” He turns the wheel to navigate a curve in the road. “And you still don’t fucking get it, and now you’ve let someone else fuck you over, and that means you’ve fucked me over, because you—never—learn—FUCK—”

Another turn in the road, not sharp but enough for the car’s back wheels to lose traction: Rumlow jerks the wheel to compensate, and the car turns too far the other way, sliding across the road, too fast and yet horribly slow. Something impacts against his chest, knocking the air out of his lungs, and then there’s a deep thud as the world lurches to the left and down.

Everything stops.

He breathes. He can still breathe. The car’s engine is still running, the heating still humming somewhere in front of him. They are on the opposite side of the road, facing backwards, and everything is tilted, as if the car had started to flip over and then stopped. It's the back passenger wheel: it has sunk deep into something that must be a drainage ditch at the side of the road.

The pressure on his chest is gone. The soldier must have reached his arm out to hold him back, which had stopped Rumlow from hitting the steering wheel.

It’s quiet. Rumlow just hears his own breathing, deep, fast, every breath now registering distant pain from his bruised chest. He can hear his own heartbeat in his ears. The sudden noise and light is a surprise when the soldier opens the passenger door.

He feels cold air on his face. Next to him, the soldier gets out; Rumlow hears his boots move against the snow as he heads towards the back of the car.

Rumlow stays still, watching in the rearview mirror. His chest hurts. His hands are still clenched tight on the wheel. He doesn’t feel like he is really here.

There’s a sudden, twisting lurch as the back of the car lifts and moves, and then a slower, gentler dip as the soldier sets the car back down, clear of the edge of the ditch. Rumlow watches in the mirror as the soldier walks back to the passenger side, and then gets back in. He closes the door, puts on his seatbelt, leans back in the seat. He wipes his face with the back of his hand.

“I knew all of that,” he says, softly, without looking at Rumlow.

Rumlow stares at him. The car's interior light has switched off now; it's dark.

“About Pierce,” the soldier goes on. “I knew he was letting it happen. I’m not stupid.”

Rumlow keeps staring. He doesn’t know what else to do. “Then—” he starts. “Then why’d you… why were you always... ”

The soldier finally turns to him. “What else was I supposed to do? He was in charge of me.”

Silence. Rumlow just looks back at him. He doesn’t know what else to do. Outside, in the light of the headlights, it has started to snow a little.

The soldier looks out the window now too, looking thoughtful. “Maybe you should let me drive.”

 

 

Chapter 18

 

He is in pain all over now, as if every muscle in his body is pulled too tight. He keeps driving, but by the time the sun goes down the car’s low fuel light has come on, and anyway he needs to stop so he can take another pill.

The first gas station he finds looks empty, which is not a surprise because no one would be out in this weather even if they weren’t still in the middle of nowhere. Rumlow pulls the car up next to one of the vacant fuel pumps, turns off the engine. If he can just stop here for a few minutes, he’ll be okay. He’ll be able to keep driving, for tonight at least.

In the passenger seat, the soldier looks over at him. There’s dried blood on his face, and a bruise has come up around one side of his mouth, but he still looks far more inconspicuous than Rumlow.

“Go,” Rumlow says. “You do know how to fill up a gas tank, don’t you?”

The soldier doesn’t answer the question. Instead he says: “Can I get some food.”

“No.”

“I have to go inside first anyway,” the soldier says. “To pay in cash.”

Rumlow exhales, rubs the side of his face. His other hand is still clutching down on the steering wheel, even though the engine is off. He lets go of the wheel, the muscles and bones in his hand aching from the grip. “Fine. Whatever. I don’t care.”

A pause. The soldier doesn’t move.

“You deaf, soldier? You want me to slap you?”

“You should let me drive, as well,” he says. “After.”

Rumlow looks at him. He can’t muster up the energy to hit him, or even to fantasize about hitting him. Just thinking about it seems like too much effort.

“Just put your fucking gloves on,” he says. “And wash your face. You look like shit.”

Then he opens his own door. Inconspicuous be damned, he needs to get out of this fucking car for a minute.

The overhead lights are bright and reflect on the snow, creating a little halo of light in the dark around the vehicle. The cold air is actually refreshing, but apart from that, nothing feels much better: his sternum aches, his legs are stiff, his head throbs. He closes his eyes and steadies himself against the side of the car, and after a few moments he hears the passenger door open as the soldier gets out.

Rumlow keeps his eyes closed, and just stands there in the freezing air, and at some point after that the soldier returns, puts whatever he’d bought in the passenger side, and then starts filling up the gas tank. The smell of gasoline is enough to bring Rumlow back from whatever mental escape he had briefly managed to achieve, back to the cold cutting into his skin and the too-bright lights.

It would be fucking stupid to keep driving like this. Almost as stupid as all the other stupid shit he has done today.

He doesn’t bother saying anything about it. He just straightens up, goes around the front of the car to the passenger side, and gets in, shoving the grocery bag full of food onto the floor.

Whatever, he thinks. It’s not like the soldier can’t drive. It doesn’t matter.

The soldier’s backpack is in the passenger-side footwell as well—of course the soldier had found the time to grab his own backpack on their way out of the house, of course—and he kicks it to one side. There’s an open bottle of water next to the center console, next to a bunch of bloodied tissues: the soldier must have used these to wash the blood off his face, and then hadn’t bothered to clean any of it up.

He is, once again, too tired to even feel annoyed. He takes another couple of pills from the container in his pocket, swallows them down with the rest of the water, and then the soldier is getting back in the car, in the driver’s seat.

“Keep heading west,” Rumlow says. “Stay off the highway. I’ll tell you if you need to turn off.”

Silence. The soldier has put his seatbelt on, but the engine doesn’t start.

Rumlow glances over at him, annoyed. The soldier is just sitting there, staring at him with a weird expression on his face.

“What? You wanted to drive. Fucking drive.”

The soldier stares for a moment longer, but then finally moves to start the ignition.

Rumlow leans back against his seat. He needs to pay some attention while the soldier is at the wheel, of course, to make sure the soldier doesn’t accidentally drive them into a lake or something. But he can at least close his eyes for a while, wait for the pills to kick in and for some of the pain to fade. He rests his head back, tries to will his aching muscles to relax.

When he wakes up the car is not moving, and everything around him is silent.

 

 

Rumlow sits upright, his right hand automatically moving to his side towards the gun in his belt holster before he remembers where he is. The car’s overhead light is on, but the engine is off. The soldier is still next to him in the driver’s seat, silent.

“What the fuck,” Rumlow hears himself say. His mouth is dry. It comes out as a half-awake croak.

“I had to stop,” the soldier says. “The roads are too bad.”

Rumlow just looks at him blankly for a moment, before thinking to check his watch. Past midnight: he’d been out for hours. He remembers half-heartedly fighting against falling asleep, but there had been a deep pull of heaviness in his brain that hasn’t entirely left, even now. His head is dull, the thoughts still difficult to put together.

The soldier is talking again. “We’re away from the road,” he says. “There’s a place we can stay near here. To rest for a while. It’s not far.”

Rumlow glances out his own window, just to re-verify the total godforsaken darkness outside, and then back at the soldier. But the soldier just stares back, looking as earnest as ever, as if this is all completely reasonable.

Arguing doesn’t seem worth the effort. Plus, any calculations about whether he should trust the soldier right now would involve contemplating the fact that if the soldier wanted to trap or kill him, luring Rumlow into an elaborate nighttime trap wouldn’t actually be necessary.

Whatever, he thinks. Might as well at least find out.

“Fine,” he says. His voice comes out dull, quiet. “Show me.”

The soldier is opening his door almost before Rumlow finishes speaking, climbing out into the dark.

Rumlow gets out as well, then opens the back door to get his bag from the back seat. There are a few more guns in the bag that he had managed to pack in time, along with other supplies. A little LED flashlight, too, which he pulls out and clips onto his belt, next to the knife that's already clipped there. It’s even colder out now, the wind cutting into his skin already, but all of that seems distant. Rumlow closes the back door, and car’s interior light fades to nothing.

With that artificial light gone, there’s just enough reflected moonlight to make out the soldier standing a few feet away, waiting for him. He is wearing his stupid backpack. They do seem to be away from the road, like the soldier had said: it looks like the far end of an unplowed driveway, lined with tall fir trees. Up ahead, he can just make out the outline of a building: low, rectangular, dark.

He is about to work up the energy to comment, but the then soldier starts moving in a direction that will take them past it, towards a thicker patch of trees.

Rumlow doesn’t comment. He follows him. It’s silent around them except for the wind and the snow breaking under his boots. There is no sign of human life. He should be asking questions: he should be doing a lot of things. He’s tired.

They cross a collapsed chain-link fence, mostly buried in the snow, and then the soldier stops in front of what looks like a small concrete structure, smaller than a building, barely taller than he is. Here, he starts to take his backpack off.

“What the fuck,” Rumlow says, or maybe he just thinks it.

Either way, the soldier doesn’t answer. Part of the little concrete wall facing them is covered with a large metal grate: the soldier pulls this off with apparent ease, setting the grate down next to him in the snow, near his discarded backpack. He looks over at Rumlow, his face unreadable in the dark, and picks up his backpack again, drops it into the newly-revealed hole in the concrete. Then, before Rumlow can react, he grabs onto the edges and slips inside, disappearing.

“You gotta be fucking kidding me,” Rumlow says.

He is suddenly alone, in the dark, the night around him silent except for the wind rippling through tree branches. Alone, and now the soldier has fucking disappeared into—a ventilation shaft? A tunnel into hell? It doesn’t seem to matter much at this point.

He could, of course, just turn around and walk away. The fact that the soldier probably still has the car keys doesn’t seem to matter that much either.

It’s freezing, and it’s hard to work up strong feelings either way, so Rumlow just swears into the darkness around him, then steps towards the vent.

Several uncomfortable minutes of cold metal later, he climbs down through another panel seems to have been cut out of the metal around it, letting go so that he drops down onto a concrete floor several feet below. He’d had his flashlight out in the crawl through the shaft, but he doesn’t need it now: as he hits the ground, lights in the ceiling above him are already flickering on.

He is in a machine room, small, cramped, underground: more metal ducting crawling up the walls and ceiling around him, the stale-smelling air around him filled with a low humming sound. When Rumlow gets himself to his feet properly, grabbing his bag, he sees that the soldier is there too, standing near the door a few feet away from him.

He tilts his head toward the doorway, where the humming noise is coming from.

“Diesel generator,” he says, as if that is the question Rumlow definitely wants answered most urgently right now.

Rumlow stares at him.“Where the fuck are we, soldier?”

But the soldier is turning around already, and Rumlow’s head is pounding with the noise and every part of his body aches from the climb and so he follows him. Past the generator itself, then through another door.

“There used to be an elevator to get down here from the main building, but they blew it up,” the soldier says.

The soldier seems to be saying things randomly as he remembers them, rather than attempting to give actual useful information, but it’s better than nothing: enough to confirm that this was a Hydra location, at least. He says: “They used to keep you down here or something?”

“Not here,” the soldier says. “It’s a testing facility.”

“Hell of a set up for a fallout shelter.”

“Not that kind of testing,” he says.

Rumlow is too tired to bother asking anything else. He is following the soldier through a narrow corridor now, lit up by a panel of fluorescent lights on the ceiling. The air is still stale, and honestly the whole place kind of smells like a dumpster, but everything inside the building looks intact, and at least they’re indoors. And like the soldier had said, it really is warmer down here. Not warm by any means, but warmer.

“In here,” the soldier says, and Rumlow follows him through another doorway..

It’s is a small room that looks like a cramped, outdated office: two desks, more fluorescent lighting, stacks of papers and banker boxes covering the carpeted floor. At the far end of the room, one of the desks has been pushed aside to make space near the back corner. He notices this because someone has laid several layers of torn cardboard down on top of the carpet there, in a shape that resembles a makeshift bed.

He glances back at the soldier: things are falling into place now, long after they should have. It would have been obvious from the beginning, if Rumlow hadn’t been so close to losing it. The metal grate that had come off so easily; the missing panel in the ventilation tunnel.

“You came here before,” he says. “After the Triskelion. Before I found you.”

The soldier had been taking off his backpack again: now he straightens up a little, looking defensive. “I told you,” he says. “It’s warmer down here.”

He looks back at the bed in the corner, trying to pull his thoughts together. “Reyner know about this place?”

“He won’t know it’s still here. No one does. And there’s something else.” He gestures to the piles of papers, spilling across over the surface of the desk, stacked in several uneven stacks.

“There’s more in the other room,” the soldier says. “They caved in the entrances to destroy this place, so they didn’t bother burning the files.”

Rumlow has stepped closer already: out of the corner of his eye, the soldier is watching him carefully. He keeps talking as Rumlow picks up the nearest handful of papers.

“There’s stuff in there that never went public,” he goes on. “It’ll help you. We could stay here while—”

Rumlow has stopped listening. Even a quick glance over the documents tells him that the soldier is, for once, actually right. There is almost certainly useful information here. At the very least, there’s blackmail material. And probably much more.

Maybe they actually are safe, for a moment at least. Maybe they are not completely fucked.

The thought stirs something in him, the first time since they left the house that he has felt a flicker of—anything, really, except irritation or dull rage. Not hope, exactly, but something.

Still, he keeps his face neutral. He’s not going to let the soldier think he’s off the hook.

“Might be helpful,” he says, dropping the papers he’d been looking at. “Is there a bathroom down here, too? Or do I have to crawl back out of that ventilation shaft to piss?”

 

 

He follows the brief directions the soldier had given him, further down the short corridor outside the room. Once there, as much out of old habit as out of curiosity or caution, he continues past the bathroom, towards the heavy swinging door that marks the other end of the corridor.

The door pushes open easily, but beyond it is just another dull, fluorescent-lit corridor, turning a corner up ahead but otherwise unremarkable, the air still stale and the lights overhead reflecting on an empty floor. It’s as if the heavy door between the two sections is just there for ventilation.

The setup reminds him, if anything, of a hospital, and that thought doesn’t make exploring further all that tempting. He turns, letting the door swing heavily back into place behind him, and heads back towards the bathroom.

Despite the unpleasant smell of this whole place, the bathroom itself is clean, and it has running water, which is a plus. He’s able to splash some cold water on his face, and then he stands there for a second, in front of the sink.

This is better, he thinks. This isn’t so bad. They can stay here, for a little while. It might be okay.

He stands there until the cold water on his face starts to make him shiver, and then goes back outside.

The soldier is standing there, waiting for him in the corridor.

“You think I’m gonna get lost?” Rumlow says.

No answer: the soldier just turns away back in the direction of the little room. Rumlow follows him.

Inside, one of the desks has been partially cleared of papers. Two of the old upholstered office chairs are pulled up next to it. Laid out on the surface of the desk in front of him is the food the soldier had purchased at the gas station, which he must have had stashed in his backpack. Packets of peanut-butter sandwich crackers, trail mix, bottled water, a sixpack of beer.

The soldier is already sitting down in one of the chairs, and now looks up at him. His face is still settled into its usual scowl, but there is a small edge of expectancy, like a cat that’s brought its master a dead mouse. Like this is all an offering: a peace offering, maybe, or a don’t kill me offering.

It’s … kind of cute. Or would be, any other time.

Rumlow doesn’t say anything, just sits down in the empty chair, grabs one of the cans of beer. The soldier watches him as he opens it and then takes a drink.

It’s good: not the beer itself, but being able to drink something cold and alcoholic. Maybe the first pleasant physical sensation he has experienced since this morning.

Across the desk, the soldier is still gazing at him, silent.

“Why the fuck are you staring at me? Eat something.”

Almost before Rumlow has finished the sentence the soldier moves, grabbing the package nearest to him on the desk and tearing it open with his teeth, taking a bite while barely looking at what he’s eating. He glances up at Rumlow then, like he’s checking that he hasn’t changed his mind, and then quickly resumes eating.

Rumlow has never withheld food from the soldier before as punishment, but then again a lot of others had, so maybe this is not that surprising.

What is surprising is after a minute or two, when the soldier slows down, and then stops like he is forcing himself to. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and then says: “You should eat something, too.”

“Not hungry,” Rumlow says.

Silence for a moment. “You haven’t eaten all day.”

Rumlow finds himself just staring at him. The soldier looks back at him with the same unreadable look on his face he’d seen in the car. The fluorescent light in this room makes the healing bruises on his face look harsher.

Finally Rumlow shakes his head, takes another drink before setting the beer can down on the desk. The soldier seems determined to ruin whatever tiny bit of good mood Rumlow had managed to obtain. “Listen, soldier. You bringing me here does not make up for what you did today. And you don’t tell me what to do. Got that?”

The soldier doesn’t even flinch. “I’m trying to help you.”

Rumlow closes his eyes for a moment. This is getting ridiculous. It is one thing for the soldier to try to avoid punishment by being useful. The soldier doing something that is directly and obviously for his own benefit is not at all strange or abnormal.

But this, all of this personal shit where he tries to act like an actual person? That is not normal. It's just more of the same shit the soldier had done back at the house. Trying to get on Rumlow’s good side so he will let his guard down.

“Soldier,” he says. “I get what you’re doing, all right? You can drop the act.”

“It’s not an act.”

“See,” Rumlow says, “This is exactly what I mean. You’re lying.”

At those words the soldier finally does flinch a little.

“You keep lying to me like this, and things are not going to go well for you,” he goes on. “Do you understand?”

The soldier sits silent for a moment, glaring at him across the desk. Then he snatches up the nearest handful of food in front of him, and shoves his chair back roughly as he gets to his feet. A second later he is sitting down on the cardboard at the back of the room, his back against the wall, his knees pulled up in front of him. He sits there, the food he’d grabbed still clutched in his left hand, his face flushed under the bright fluorescent lights, looking furious.

For fuck’s sake, Rumlow thinks. “You’re a fucking child, you know that?”

The soldier doesn’t answer, which is fine, and honestly maybe it’s a blessing that the tantrum had put an end to the conversation. Rumlow takes advantage of the silence to take another long drink, but then of course the peace doesn’t last and the soldier starts talking again.

“I told you from the start I didn’t want to kill anyone,” he says. “I didn’t lie. I told you I wouldn’t do it. I said I wouldn't kill anyone.”

Rumlow should not engage, not when the soldier’s being so erratic, but at this point it’s too much effort not to. “All you had to do is let me kill him. But instead you—”

“He was nice to me,” the soldier snaps, cutting him off. “You told me that if someone is nice to you, you do nice things in return.”

“I never fucking said that.”

“You said that! You said that right after you found me.”

Okay, maybe he had said something like that. The one fucking time the soldier actually paid attention to him, and it’s this bullshit.

He puts his hands on the edge of the desk—he’d put his drink down at some point, doesn’t even remember doing it. “You know, it’s actually fucking impressive the way you keep finding new ways to fuck everything up.”

“Fuck you,” the soldier says.

“Yeah, great. Great conversation, as always. I appreciate it.”

“Fuck you,” he says again. “I hate you.”

Rumlow shakes his head, fumbles for another drink. His head hurts. His chest, as well, like just the action of breathing hurts the bruises there. God, he wishes he had some stronger alcohol. Beer isn’t going to do enough, and of course now he’s gotta start rationing his pills, because he doesn’t have Reyner anymore. Another problem to thank the soldier for.

He opens the new beer can: the action takes a second or two longer than it should, like his fingers aren’t working right. He feels flushed now, body prickling with sweat, even though it’s still so cold down here, cold enough to make the old broken bones in his hand ache.

Across the small room, the soldier is still sitting on that makeshift cardboard bed on the floor, his head leaning back against the wall, his right hand now cradling his bad shoulder. His eyes are still fixed on Rumlow: he stares up at him through his messy hair, still looking furious, but he also looks like he’s about to cry.

It’s that thought, the thought of having to spend the rest of the night with the soldier having another stupid sniffling breakdown, that makes him get to his feet to leave the room.

He gets up too quickly, in fact—the room spins for a moment, everything feeling flushed despite the cold in the room. He steadies himself quickly, and then grabs his bag, turning towards the door. He has been trapped in a small enclosed space with the soldier all day: for the rest of the night, at least, he can go somewhere else. On the way back from the bathroom he'd passed another office that looked almost identical to this room; he can sleep on the floor in there and be blessedly alone, at least until the morning.

“Where are you going,” the soldier says from behind him.

Rumlow doesn’t bother to answer. 

He’s really not at his best right now, because he does not see the soldier coming: he is just suddenly there, just as Rumlow is reaching the doorway, inserting himself effortlessly between Rumlow and the exit, blocking him.

“Wait,” the soldier says.

Rumlow is too tired to give a shit about whatever the soldier is trying to do. He just shoves past him.

Or tries to, at least: the soldier has grabbed his arm.

There’s a second when the room sways again. Rumlow finds himself looking down at the soldier’s metal left hand, gripping just under his elbow, pressing in hard enough to hurt through the layers of his clothing.

“Let go of me, soldier.”

“No,” the soldier says, calm. His tone is measured now, like he has forcibly calmed himself down, like he is attempting to convince Rumlow of something entirely rational. “You don’t want to go down there.”

Rumlow had, of course, just been trying to get to the room next door. But the soldier doesn’t know that—and the soldier is talking about down there, and he must mean the corridor outside, the one that Rumlow had gone part of the way down earlier.

He looks at the soldier: he doesn’t have much of a choice, since he is entirely blocking Rumlow’s way. The soldier might look outwardly calm, but Rumlow, unfortunately, knows him well enough to read what’s showing in his posture, his face: the soldier is not talking about avoiding a collapsed wall or a live wire or any kind of physical danger. No, there’s something there he doesn’t want Rumlow to see.

He’s so tired that the only thought he can dredge up is yeah, I should have known it was too good to be true.

He doesn’t feel anything else, not even curiosity, but he knows that he is going to try to see what it is, regardless. He doesn’t know why. Maybe the same reason he’d agreed to follow the soldier down here. Maybe just the inertia that comes with exhaustion.

He pulls his arm away, or tries to, and maybe he says something as well, because the soldier says no and then keeps talking, his voice flat and unconvincing, like he is repeating the words he is saying by rote. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry I said—I'm sorry.”

Rumlow yanks his arm back, more forcefully this time, and surprisingly it actually works: the soldier’s grip loosens, his arm falls back to his side.

“I didn’t do anything,” the soldier says. 

Rumlow just pushes past him, and he expects the soldier to grab him again, but he doesn’t.

The lights overhead in the corridor are bright, bright enough to reflect off the floor and hurt his head, but at least the soldier is silent behind him and doesn’t attempt to stop him again. Rumlow reaches the end of the corridor, and opens the door.

 

 

 

Chapter 19

 

There are marks on the floor ahead of him: it looks like some type of dried liquid, dark against the pale surface of the linoleum. The soldier is somewhere far behind him now, and Rumlow follows the short corridor until it turns a corner, and then finally ends in a set of heavy double doors.

He keeps his hand hovering near his sidearm, and out of some habit he unholsters the weapon, even though deep down he knows he doesn’t really need it. On some level, he already has a good idea of what is on the other side of those doors.

He pushes one of the doors with his free hand, and it swings forward with a soft creak, the rubber sealing panel at its base dragging across the floor. The lights aren’t on in the room beyond it, but there’s just enough light from the corridor to see inside. Rumlow only has to take one step forward before he stops, and then lowers his gun. He had been right: everything in here had stopped being a threat a long time ago.

There are at least eight bodies: three laid out side-by-side not far from the door, the others beyond them lying haphazardly, slumped and twisted like they had fallen or been clumsily dropped. Most are male, and almost all are wearing white lab coats. The smell is bad: even in the muted light from the corridor he can tell they have been dead for a while.

The body closest to where Rumlow is standing is a middle-aged man, lying on his back. His skin is grey, his features sunken like rotten fruit. This corpse seems to be the source of whatever had stained the floor outside, as if it had been dragged here after death. There’s another faint trail of dark, dried fluid that starts where the dead man is lying. It leads back along the floor to the spot where Rumlow is standing, under his boots.

Rumlow feels himself set the gun back in its holster. Then he turns, letting the door swing closed heavily behind him. Out in the corridor, he leans against one of the plain white walls, bends forward, and retches.

Nothing comes up—he hasn’t eaten in a while—but his body tries again before he can do anything, this time bringing up liquid that hits the floor in front of him. This isn’t normal—he’s seen worse shit than this before, in more confined spaces—but he’s throwing up again already and can’t think. He sucks in air. He’s still trying to catch his breath when he sees the soldier again, but he has started throwing up again before he can think or react.

And then the soldier is touching him already, palm resting against the back of Rumlow’s neck. Rumlow should shove him away, out of principle if nothing else. But he doesn’t, already deep under that layer of apathy that descends when your body is spending all its resources trying to puke its own guts out. It’s hard to get a enough oxygen, and his vision is blurring. The soldier’s right hand is warm, tight on the back of his neck. The grip is steadying and firm and not forceful, but all Rumlow can think of is being held down underwater.

 

 

When he can think again, or close to it, he is lying on a surface that’s smooth and cold.

It takes a moment to process that he is inside a bathroom: the same bathroom he’d been in before, near the room with the files. He is on the floor just outside of one of the two stalls, a strip of fluorescent lights above him and icy tiles under his back. His skin feels so burning-hot from the vomiting that the cold is almost pleasant, although the pain isn’t.

He hurts all over. His stomach, his throat, his head, his chest. This room smells like cheap cleaning products and not like death, but the smell is still there. It’s hard to think about anything. Every one of his internal organs feels like it’s been hit by a separate truck.

He knows how he got here: the soldier had moved them away from that room, had brought him in here, although he can’t remember why he’s alone now. And yet when the door to the bathroom opens he feels himself sit up, instantly, like he’s been hit with an electric shock, like he needs to get a wall behind him as soon as he can.

It’s the soldier, of course: he stops a few feet away from where Rumlow is sitting, and then squats down, close to the same level as Rumlow but still at some distance. He holds out a bottle of water.

Rumlow hesitates, then reaches out to take it. Sitting up had hurt, and the sudden movement had made his stomach heave again. It’s too much right now to think about why he had reacted like that.

“Drink,” the soldier says. He’s still sitting just out of Rumlow’s reach, as if he’s afraid Rumlow will attack him, or throw up on him. “You need to. You’re sick.”

A flash of annoyance, the clearest thing in his head since this bullshit started. Of course he’s fucking sick. Does the soldier think he can’t handle seeing a few corpses?

He twists the cap off the bottle, with some difficulty, and takes a sip. The plastic feels slippery in his hands. It hurts to swallow.

“You can’t just stick to pills and alcohol without eating or drinking,” the soldier is saying, his voice droning in the background as Rumlow takes another small sip. “It’s messing up your stomach. You’re going to—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Rumlow says.

The soldier does, blessedly, and Rumlow wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and says: “Tell me what the fuck I just found.”

The soldier looks at him for a moment, like he is trying to think of what to say. “I didn’t kill them,” he says. “They were dead when I got here. I told you that already. ”

Rumlow sighs. Not that he’d expected the soldier to actually be honest, but still. “So, all right. It’s a coincidence, then. Just like, blind fucking chance that all those Hydra guys ended up dead here, in this exact place, right after an assassin with a chip on his shoulder about Hydra came to visit them. That it?”

The soldier scowls. “I moved some of the bodies. That’s all.”

“I don’t even care if you killed some creepy scientists or whatever, soldier. I just want you to tell the truth.”

“I am.”

Rumlow exhales, closes his eyes for a moment. His head is throbbing. “Any other surprises you want to tell me about? You gonna tell me exactly what this place is, at least? You know, be honest, for once in your fucking life?”

He expects something, another lie at least, but the soldier just stares at him, his face cold under the fluorescent lights. He says: “You should drink some more water.”

Yeah, he should have known better than to try.

He sets the water bottle down on the floor next to him. Whatever, he can figure shit out himself. Better than sitting on a bathroom floor trying to get anything useful from the soldier.

He pushes himself up, steadying himself against the outside of the bathroom stall. The soldier gets up too, stepping forward like he wants to help, but Rumlow waves him off before making it to the sink and turning on the faucet to wash his face. The dead-body smell is still there, a bit, and he knows from experience it won’t really go away unless he showers and washes his clothes and does a whole lot of other things he has no hope of doing right now.

“Let me help you,” says the soldier.

“Fuck off,” Rumlow says, but he’s tired, so he doesn’t push the soldier off when he puts his arm around Rumlow's shoulders. The soldier still smells like soap from the doctor’s house, below the smell of blood.

He lets the soldier help him down the corridor, back towards the office room they’d been in before. But when they’re inside he pushes the soldier away, and heads to the desk near the back by himself. He sits down in an office chair close to it, next to the stacks of boxes he had seen before.

Rumlow had only glanced over the papers when they’d been in this room earlier, and those had been the ones that the soldier had laid out—personnel files, mostly. But there had been more in here, a lot more. There might be enough to tell him more about this place. Enough to give him something, at least, given that the soldier won’t tell him shit.

He pushes aside the lid from one of the cardboard boxes next to the desk, and then kicks the whole box over, so that the papers inside spill across the thin carpet. He grabs the nearest handful. The papers have been stored in neatly labeled cardboard folders—Hydra is nothing if not organised—and the labels on the outside are in some numeric code he doesn’t understand. But most of the text inside is in English.

He starts flipping through them. Not far from him, the soldier has sat down too, in another chair across the desk. If he isn’t happy about what Rumlow is doing, he keeps quiet about it.

Several of the folders Rumlow looks through have images, labeled and printed in full color. Rumlow only needs to see a few of these to confirm what he’s looking at.

“Huh,” he says out loud. So it was that type of testing facility.

He almost feels stupid for not guessing earlier, because it seems obvious now. But then again, he’d never had anything to do with medical shit.

He drops the stack of files back to the floor, next to the rest of the pile he’d tipped out, and sits back in the padded chair.

“See,” he says to the soldier, who is still just sitting there, arms folded like he’s sulking. “You could have just explained that they were doctors doing weird shit. Didn’t even have to lie to me.”

No answer. The soldier’s eyes move down to the papers spilled out across the carpet, then back to him. His face is blank.

Rumlow glances down at them himself. One of the pictures is visible where it’s slipped out of its folders, and it’s a particularly bloody one. “I probably would have killed a few of them them, too, if it was personal.”

The soldier just glares at him, clenching his jaw. “I. didn’t. Kill. them.”

Rumlow sighs. “Soldier, for fuck’s sake—”

“I was getting sick,” the soldier says. His voice is calm, despite the interruption: he speaks slowly, like he is measuring the words out. “I remembered this place. Before. I thought they’d be able to help me here. But they were dead already. I cleared some of the bodies away from here because I wanted to sleep. That’s what happened.” He stops, glaring. “I don’t care if you believe me.”

“Soldier, you—”

“I don't care if you believe me,” the soldier says again, louder this time.

Rumlow wants to speak, but finds he can’t say anything. His skin doesn’t feel hot anymore: the room feels very cold now.

It doesn’t even matter if the soldier is lying, not now. What matters is the way the soldier is looking at him, calm and impassive and so directly defiant, no hint of the fear or uncertainty that would usually creep in when he spoke like this. It’s so unexpected that his main reaction is just the same desire that he had felt in the bathroom before, when the soldier had come in. Like he wants to just get up and leave, get the fuck away from him and from all of this.

He pushes that feeling down, because he’s already done his fill of stupid irrational shit in the last half an hour.

The stupidest thing, of course, was being nice to the soldier just now. Slipping up and trying to talk to him like he’s another human. And in return, he’d gotten this.

The anger that comes from this is more comforting and familiar than whatever the fuck had been in his head before, so he focuses on it. The soldier is gazing down at the papers on the floor again now, his arms still folded across his chest. He still doesn’t look the slightest bit fazed by what he’d said just now. He looks like he’s thinking about something else.

“So,” Rumlow asks, “Where’s the file they kept on you?”

The soldier looks up at him. He looks more confused than anything else.

“Come on,” Rumlow says. “You know all about this place, you know there has to be one. And you came back here by yourself. You must’ve been able to find your own medical files.”

No answer, although the silence itself is enough of a reaction to make him press on.

“Must be a big one, huh,” Rumlow says. “What kinda pictures has it got?”

Still no answer, but just for a second the soldier’s face twitches a little bit.

It’s stupid, what he’s doing. It’s a fucking stupid thing to do. But the soldier's reaction is at least something, and it’s better than that strange calmness and the tone he'd had before. Rumlow presses on. “Think they kept a record of all the dicks you sucked, as well? Probably needed a whole storage room to keep those records, they wouldn’t fit in just a—”

“Stop,” the soldier says, almost too quiet to hear.

“Or what, soldier?” The words are automatic now, like he has started a machine that is moving under its own power. “What are you going you do? Freak out and hit me again? That it?”

The soldier frowns at him and shakes his head, a single jerking movement. His body is tense, arms tighter across his chest.

“C’mon,” Rumlow says. And hell, he means it, because right now even that seems better than the alternative, better than the soldier just staring at him like he’d just done, better than all the pitiful bullshit he's done so far tonight. “Why not? You already dragged me down here with all your other dead bodies. Why not finish the job?”

“Stop,” the soldier says again.

“I’m giving you permission, soldier. Do it.”

“I—”

“Fucking do it,” Rumlow says, and then the soldier stands up to full height in one quick rushing movement, and there’s a second where Rumlow just looks up at him and waits for it happen, and all he feels in his head is a kind of dull, empty relief.

… But the soldier just stands there, and doesn’t move.

Rumlow looks at him, and the soldier stands still, holding his gaze. Finally, he says: “No.”

It’s quiet. Rumlow doesn’t know what to say. His head feels empty. The room is as cold and still as a tomb.

The soldier breaks eye contact and looks away. He looks suddenly confused, like he is trying to figure out what program to follow. He keeps standing there, rigid. His fists clench at his sides, then relax.

“I…” he says, and then he stops, takes a breath, still looking the floor instead of Rumlow. “I have to go check the generator.”

Rumlow just stares up at him, and then the soldier turns away.

A moment later he is gone, and Rumlow is alone in the silent room.

 

 

Chapter 20

Notes:

Note to all readers: Please learn from my misfortunes and always be sure to backup your files so that you don't have wait until the data recovery lab scrapes your stupid fanfiction drafts (and everything else) off of your failed solid state drive, do not be a big stupid idiot like me

The others have had the soldier for a few hours now, and Rumlow is getting impatient. He’s down in the far reaches of one of the lower floors, standing outside a room that had once been used for storing weapons. He knocks on the closed door with the side of his fist, and then unlocks it with his card before giving anyone inside a chance to answer, because he is tired and sore after the mission and he’s not in the mood to wait.

The inside of the small room is dim: two of the ceiling lights have been broken since before Rumlow can remember. He’s prepared for the worst when he steps inside, so it’s a relief to see that only the commander and the soldier are still here, and that the commander, at least, is fully dressed.

"Connor,” Rumlow says to the commander, and the man looks up at Rumlow and grins. He is lounging on the wooden bench that runs along one side of the room, oozing the sort of relaxed self-satisfaction that only comes with either drunkenness or an immensely satisfying lay. The soldier’s sitting by his feet, naked, staring down at the floor in front of him and looking vaguely furious.

“Rumlow,” Connor says. “You just missed the others. Did you want to—”

“I need him back now, sir.” He nods at the soldier, who has not reacted since Rumlow came in. “Medical’s ready to see him.”

“No hurry,” Connor says vaguely. He’s reaching into one of the pockets in his pants as he speaks, and he pulls out a dented box of cigarettes. “Even if Pierce decides to come down, he won’t—”

“I got actual important shit to do with him, you know that.”

Despite his tone, the relaxed smile on his superior’s face doesn’t waver. He pulls out a cigarette and a lighter from inside of the box. “All right,” he says. “Just—give us a minute here.” It's dark enough in here that the glare from the lighter reflects off the soldier’s arm. He inhales, then holds out the packet to Rumlow, who steps closer to accept both a cigarette and the proffered light. He doesn’t remember the smoke alarm ever working in here, either. The smell of smoke is actually an improvement in the air in the room, which before had smelled mostly like old gun solvent and various different bodily fluids.

Rumlow doesn’t sit down, though, stays standing near the end of the bench. Sitting down would be nice, but he wants to make this experience as brief as possible while not directly disobeying.

Connor inhales again contentedly, and then sits up: he leans forward towards the soldier, who’s still slumped at his feet, and offers him the cigarette.

Offers is probably the wrong word: he holds it in front of his mouth, and then when the soldier doesn’t react quickly enough, leans forward more to grab the soldier’s hair with his free hand, forcibly shifting his head to a preferable angle and pushing the cigarette against his mouth.

This action seems to wake the soldier up a bit, enough for him to open his mouth and then inhale normally, at least. Now that Rumlow is closer and his eyes have adjusted, he can see that the soldier’s face is flushed, like he’s been crying. There are dark patches on the skin around his neck, colorless in the dim light.

“He hurt?” Rumlow says.

“Nah, he’s good,” Connor says. “We went easy on him. Always do.” He’s still bent forward over the soldier as he speaks, and he takes the cigarette back out of his mouth in order to take another drag on it himself, his other hand still twisted in the soldier’s hair. Then he returns it to the soldier, who is ready and apparently obedient enough to take it this time, steadying the cigarette with his fingers. Rumlow's almost impressed at the display of apparent generosity, but then of course the next time Connor takes the cigarette back, he says down to him: “What, you’re not going to say thank you?”

Rumlow resists the urge to roll his eyes. He is too tired to have to watch this kind of shit.

The soldier turns to look up at the commander briefly, but doesn’t answer. His mouth looks bruised as well, to the extent that Rumlow wonders if it hurts to talk.

“Hey,” Connor follows up. “No sulking.” When the soldier still doesn’t reply, he tightens his hand in his hair, shaking him back and forth a little. “What’s your problem? Do you really want us to have to—”

“Stop fucking with him,” Rumlow says.

Connor looks up at him sharply. “Just making conversation.”

“I mean it,” he says. “Medical’s waiting for him. You’re just going to mess him up more.”

He looks up at him for a moment longer, and says: “Fine.” He exhales, and then, looking up at Rumlow the whole time like he’s making a point, reaches down and puts out the cigarette against the skin of the soldier's neck.

The soldier has been so unresponsive until now that Rumlow is surprised that he actually reacts: he makes a pained noise and drops his head, his fists clenching. Rumlow is tired enough that the sight of it just irritates him more.

But at least Connor seems satisfied that he's made his point: he smiles, showing teeth. “Get up, then,” he says down to the soldier. “Put some clothes on. Your bodyguard is waiting for you.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Rumlow says.

 

In the examination room, a single tired-looking guy in a lab coat is waiting for them, hunched over a metal cart near the door. His eyes stay on the soldier as Rumlow leads him across the tiny space, hand near the elbow of his human arm, eventually directing him to sit down on the edge of the examination bed that takes up a third of the room. Escorting him like this always seems unnecessary—the soldier could do all this himself, even in his current state—but he does lean over a bit towards him as Rumlow lets go of him, as if Rumlow had been providing at least some kind of stabilizing presence.

Maybe Pierce had been right, he thinks. Maybe the soldier does like him. Still, he steps back out of immediate attack distance as the man in the lab coat starts setting up an IV.

The soldier stays docile, though: in fact he hardly seems to notice.

“He’s calmer than usual,” the man says.

Rumlow makes a noncommittal sound. Under this light the soldier looks much worse, the bruises on his neck and face vivid. Enough to make you feel pity, if it had been another man.

The man says something about the IV taking thirty minutes or so, and then disappears out the door before he can ask any questions.

Figures.

There’s only one chair in the room, against the wall within the tight space between the bed and the metal cart with all the drugs on it, and Rumlow sits down on it, taking a moment just to appreciate being off his feet. He has his tablet with him, and he gets it out now: he still has a report to finish while he's waiting. It’s silent in the room, and it’s not until about ten minutes later that he notices that the soldier is crying.

He is being impressively quiet about it, but it’s not like you can really hide anything in a room this size. He's still sitting on the edge of the exam bed, and he has dropped his head forward so his hair hides his face. There are short, uneven breaks in his breathing, almost imperceptible movements in his chest.

It’s not like Rumlow can do anything about it, though, so he looks back down at his tablet and goes back to his work. In another situation, the contrast might have been amusing: hearing the soldier crying in the background while Rumlow writes about him killing people. Now, though, it’s just depressing.

He works, and the room is silent except for the occasional sniffling, and he doesn’t even notice how much time has passed until the door opens.

Rumlow looks up, but not particularly quickly, because he's expecting the guy in the lab coat. But then he sees who it actually is, and gets to his feet automatically before he even has time to think. 

Alexander Pierce has stepped through the door, Connor near his side and trailing slightly behind him. Rumlow feels a sudden desire to take a step back, although of course the chair he’d just been sitting on is right behind him, and there’s a wall behind that.

This is—this is unexpected. Pierce does occasionally visit these areas, yes, but why the hell is he in here? Now?

His boss had been saying something to Connor—the two of them seem to have been in mid-conversation—but now he stops, nods.

“Mr. Rumlow,” he says. He should look out of place, standing in this tiny miserable treatment room, but he’s the type of man who seems to change the room around him, rather than the other way around. Rumlow, pressed in between Pierce and the wall and the exam bed on three sides of him, finds himself automatically handing over the tablet in his hand, like it's an offering.

Pierce takes it with another nod, and then looks down and skims the screen for approximately twenty seconds before nodding again and passing the tablet on to Connor. He turns his attention to the soldier, who’s still sitting on the bed. The soldier’s eyes are fixed on Pierce: he has not moved since he came in.

“Soldier,” Pierce says. There’s a pause of a few seconds in which he just stops and looks him over: the needle taped to his arm, his half-dressed state, the marks on his neck and bare torso. The exam bed is high enough to put the two of them almost at the same height even though the soldier is sitting down, but the soldier is hunching forward like he’s attempting to make himself smaller. The contrast between them is ridiculous, like a king examining a stray dog. Why the hell is he even here, Rumlow thinks again.

“Connor has told me you weren’t injured on the mission,” Pierce says to him finally, his tone bright.

The soldier doesn’t answer, just stares at him.

“Mr Rumlow’s report seems to say the same thing.”

Still no answer, although to the soldier’s credit, Rumlow has no idea what he’s getting at, either.

“So what’s going on with your neck?”

He hears Connor snort with laughter from where he’s standing near the door. The soldier doesn’t react to that, just looks at Pierce blankly. He looks as genuinely confused as Rumlow feels.

“Soldier,” Pierce says, more firmly. “What happened?”

The soldier stares, although his expression seems to waver a little. And now—Rumlow is even more fucking confused. Pierce must know what had happened. Anyone could, if nothing else, make an educated guess just by looking at him, and Pierce knows fucking everything.

The soldier swallows, breaks eye contact and looks away. It’s quiet, somehow even quieter than before, because things tend to get silent when Pierce is around. The seconds tick on, and the soldier seems to be aware of the drop in Pierce’s mood enough that he makes an attempt to speak. “Sir, I—” He stops, swallows again.

“It’s late, soldier,” Pierce says. His voice is harsher now, disappointment mixed with warning. “I did not come all the way down here to experience your attitude problems. I asked you to report what happened.”

The soldier’s breath catches. His hands are both gripping the edge of the bed, fingers digging into the surface of the black vinyl.

“Well?” Pierce says, and the soldier opens his mouth like he’s trying to speak again, but despite the obvious warning in Pierce’s voice, it’s like he physically cannot get the words out.

Pierce lifts his hand and slaps him.

“I’m sorry!” the soldier bursts out, but there’s already another slap, loud in the silent room.

The soldier wails now. “Sir, please,” he says. He’s crying again now, sobbing pathetically, his teeth clenched.

Connor laughs again, louder this time. And suddenly it’s obvious, so obvious that Rumlow feels stupid for not understanding from the beginning.

Of course Pierce knows the answer already. He knows exactly what had happened. That’s why he’s doing this. It’s the reason he’d come in here. The soldier’s reaction is the whole point.

And of course Rumlow should have known already, but this— this just isn’t what he’d expect, not from Pierce. His boss has has always been an asshole, obviously, but his cruelty usually has a type of efficiency to it. What he’s doing now is more like a repeat of Connor’s bullshit in the other room: the kind of thing that normal assholes do to wind down when they're in a bad mood. Connor might do it; hell, he might do it. Watching Pierce do it seems—wrong, somehow.

“Shh. Shhh,” his boss is saying now: he's apparently decided not to escalate things at least, not for now anyway. “It’s okay. No matter,” he goes on, in a tone of gentle disappointment. He moves back a little, then squeezes the soldier’s thigh right above the knee. “We’ll talk about it later.”

The soldier doesn’t respond. He’s still crying, louder and openly now, like all the efforts before to make it quiet aren't working anymore.

Pierce steps back, watching. No wonder he hadn’t bothered escalating, Rumlow thinks. He has already gotten exactly what he wanted.

Near the door, Connor is fiddling around with the tablet now. Pierce steps back, and apparently he notices Rumlow’s attention on him, because he turns to him now, looking pleased.

“Have you considered,” he says, “That whenever this happens to him, it’s for the first time?”

Rumlow doesn’t know how what to say. “I hadn’t,” he says finally, which is an honest answer, if not a particularly intelligent one.

Pierce nods like it’s a satisfactory response. He turns back to the soldier, and keeps his eyes on him for a moment longer. "Nowhere else to go inside that brain," he says thoughtfully. "Not that much in there, is there, soldier?"

No answer: the soldier barely seems to hear. His eyes are closed, and the crying has died down a little bit now: he looks pale, hollowed out, like someone who’s not really there. Pierce stands in front of him for a moment longer, taking in the scene like he’s observing some immense personal achievement. The sense of inappropriateness is still so strong that that Rumlow wants to turn away.

He doesn’t, though. He just makes himself stand up straight, brushes off the feeling. Pierce is just like this about the soldier, even if he isn’t like that about other things. He just has to accept that for now. It’s just one more thing Rumlow doesn’t yet understand, and it’s not his job to understand it.

 

---

 

Now, years later, alone in a cold room underground, Rumlow understands.

The air is so cold in here now, even though his body feels flushed. His clothes are damp with sweat, unpleasant against his skin. He sits, not moving, his own heartbeat loud in his ears.

What the fuck had just come over him? What the fuck was that about?

Rumlow makes himself get up, pushes himself up off the chair he’d been slumped in, moving stiffly, barely trusting himself to walk. He finds his bag where he’d left it before, opens it to retrieve the single bottle of pills from the house. There’s an open bottle of water still on the desk, and he uses it to swallow two of the pills, then sits back down. The movement alone is enough to make him shivery and nauseous; he has to make an effort not to move until it passes. He finds himself staring at the bright surface of the desk in front of him, at nothing.

It all makes sense now, everything that at the time had seemed like excessive pettiness. The depths to which Pierce had hated the soldier, the ways he had gone out of his way to hate him. It had seemed extreme, the lengths Pierce had gone to, the things he’d allowed other people to do. The things he had directed other people to do, more and more, as the years went on.

Now—Rumlow gets it. It makes sense. It had been a perfectly fucking rational response to the soldier—the way the soldier infects everything around him with his bullshit. The way he makes everyone as stupid as he is. Like he had done to Rumlow, just now.

It’s too much. Being stuck here, and now acting like this. It’s ridiculous. It’s too much.

He leans back in the chair and closes his eyes. Slowly, dimly, every disjointed thread that is rushing through his brain starts to knit together into one single thought.

I have to end this.

 

 

 

Chapter 21

“Sit down,” Rumlow says as soon as the soldier comes back.

He hates that he feels relief when the soldier actually complies, and sits down opposite him at the desk. But then again, he’ll take that feeling as more proof that he is making the right decision.

He leans back in his chair: the creaking sound it makes is loud in the silent room. Across from him, the soldier stares past him and doesn’t make eye contact. He seems uncertain, and that part is, at least, a good sign. Rumlow is calmer now, which might just be the effect of the pills he’d taken, but maybe it’s also a new sense of purpose. It’s easier now to conceive of talking to the soldier without wanting to punch him.

He cuts to the point right away. “It’s done, soldier,” he says. “It’s time to go our separate ways.”

There is no response: the soldier doesn’t even look at him. For a moment Rumlow wonders if the soldier had even heard what he said, before he remembers that the room is completely silent and they are the only two non-dead people around in a five-mile radius.

“Tomorrow,” he goes on. “Once we’ve got what we need, and we’re out of here. After that, you’re free to go.”

More silence. The soldier looks down at the desk in front of him, keeps his eyes fixed on where his metal hand is resting on the laminate surface.

“Why,” he finally, his voice flat.

It takes Rumlow a moment to answer, because the question is both unexpected and irritating. Why? Really?

But he is feeling calmer now, so he takes a breath, and lies.“You’re not in trouble,” he says, keeping his voice as gentle as possible. “I’m not upset with you. It’s just… done. I needed you for something, and it’s done now.”

The soldier stays quiet, apparently processing this. He is still looking down at the desk, and he seems to be breathing more deeply than usual. Rumlow just watches: he doesn’t know what else to add. He’d expected whining, or anger, or an argument. The soldier seems genuinely surprised, and now he looks almost like he is about to cry.

Still—it could have gone worse, even if he’s not in the mood to watch whatever performance he’s going to put on next. “Look, we should get some sleep,” he says. “It’s late. We can talk tomorrow.”

“You’re still sick,” the soldier says, as if Rumlow hadn’t said anything. He speaks as if he’s still deep in thought, not lifting his eyes from the table. “You can’t leave. You need me.”

There’s a new sense of heaviness in his stomach that is both unwanted and unnecessary; he ignores it. “Not your call, soldier. I’m the one in charge.” He pushes the chair back a little, goes to stand up. “Now, I’m gonna go lie down, you can—”

“No,” the soldier says, more forcefully, in a way that makes Rumlow stop moving and then hate himself for doing it. The soldier is looking at him now, his eyes a little too wide, both hands resting on the edge of the desk in front of him like he’s about to push himself up.

“You’re not well,” he continues, and his voice is not quite as steady as his posture. “You’re not making good decisions. You—you wouldn’t stop using me when you’re this sick.”

Rumlow doesn’t answer. He’s so tired, suddenly. He’d been tired already, but now it feels like a physical weight. Like being buried.

“I can go against orders if the person giving orders is impaired,” the soldier goes on. “You know that. I can—”

Rumlow is no longer listening. He’d had low expectations, but the soldier insulting him on top of all his other bullshit—and even worse is that it’s his own damn fault. He has always been upfront with the soldier, never tricked him, never kept him in the dark when it wasn’t necessary. And now, again—again—Rumlow has made the stupid mistake of treating him like a human, and has received this in return.

He stands up, steadies himself. Fuck waiting until tomorrow. At this point, freezing to death in the snow outside is preferable.

“Stop,” the soldier says as he steps away from the desk. “Commander, stop.”

Rumlow ignores him. His bag is on the floor not far from where he’d been sitting, and it’s slightly easier to stay upright now than it had been earlier.

The soldier is still talking, closer to him now. “Sir. It’s not—sir, please—”

He doesn’t even bother answering, just reaches for his bag. The soldier is next to him now, and Rumlow expects him to grab his arm again, because that’s what he seems to like doing now whenever he wants to interfere; he expects he’ll have to shove the soldier away again, or maybe hit him.

Instead, the soldier simply hooks his metal hand around Rumlow’s right arm, just above the elbow, and then the world lurches and blurs as he is turned, his arm wrenched up behind his back and the soldier close behind him.

It’s fast, half a blurred second before he’s pinned, but that’s not an excuse, not a reason for him to let it happen. But it happens, and he finds himself being pushed forward, still upright, the soldier’s human hand tight on his shoulder so he doesn’t stumble. The other hand has his arm looked against his back, and the soldier’s voice is close to his ear.

“It’s not safe to be by yourself now,” he says, his tone hard and flat and almost apologetic. His hair brushes against the side of his neck.

There’s no good reason for him not to resist, not to do it right now. The soldier’s grip on him is not particularly secure, and he hadn’t even made an effort to incapacitate Rumlow properly. But everything around him feels quiet and slow, too far away to try, even as he is pushed towards the back of the room, away from his bag, away from the exit. A moment later and he is on the floor, set down next to the wall, like a prisoner.

He’s sitting upright, the hardness of wall behind his shoulder. Next to him he sees that patch of cardboard: strips of it made from flattened out boxes, covering the carpet in the back corner of the room. A grey blanket still thrown aside next to the wall, a few empty food containers. His brain is working enough in the background to take all of this in, at least. But when he tries to focus on something else, like why the fuck he is not moving, it doesn’t work.

The soldier sits down next to him now, close enough to Rumlow for him to feel his body heat.

“You need to rest,” he says. “You’re not well.”

The irritation caused by his voice is enough to trigger something automatic: Rumlow pulls away from him, but the soldier just takes him by the upper arm and holds him in place. “Stay still,” he says, and Rumlow does, like he’s an animal that has been fucking stunned.

The wall behind them is heavy brick, and he finds himself leaning his head back against it. He doesn’t just feel tired, or sick. He feels like he’s not even here.  For all his effort to make himself think, the most he can manage is replaying what just happened, and maybe he can make that useful. Identify errors, evaluate, as if he were preparing an after-action review following a failed mission.

First mistake: deciding to actually talk to the soldier, instead of just taking any opportunity to get the fuck out of here. Second mistake: letting the soldier argue, and not going on the offensive at the first sign of disagreement. Both of those could be mostly explained Rumlow being too soft on him, as usual. Third mistake—third mistake is letting all of this happen. But why?

He closes his eyes. The cold of the wall behind him, the dull pain throughout his head and chest, the soldier’s firm grip on his arm: none of it is real. Maybe this is what bleeding out feels like, although he has been reasonably close to that before and this seems far worse and far less rational.

He makes an effort to drag his thoughts back on subject. Evaluate. List the events as they happened, observe objectively, without immediate blame. There’s a reason it played out like this, that’s clear once he looks at it now. There’s an identifiable cause behind his actions. Problem is, that cause is something so fucking unpleasant that his whole body seems to have shut down in order not to experience it—

But he can see it, now that he has stepped back and forced himself to look, and the reason is that he is scared, and not the way you’d be scared of an animal or a force of nature, not in the sense of healthy respect or caution, but just the way you’d be scared of another man. He is scared of the soldier, has been for a while now, and that’s why he has been making so many mistakes.

There’s no relief that comes with this new sense of clarity. It’s more like a blow, or the sudden feeling of filth on your skin.

He doesn’t move, just closes his eyes tighter against the glaring light of the room. He needs—he just needs to get away. Get past the soldier somehow, and get his bag, and get out. Can manage everything after that, as long as he’s not in here, like this. Once he’s no longer trapped in the underground hovel he’d been stupid enough to let the soldier drag him into. After that, he can plan and adapt and let his brain go back to normal.

Next to him, the soldier seems to have interpreted Rumlow’s silence as compliance with his order to rest. His hand is still loosely around Rumlow’s upper arm, but he seems to have relaxed, retreating into the usual stillness he displays when things are going well and his immediate reactions are not needed, unmoving like he’s trying not to disturb him. Trying to let him rest.

I’m too close to shoot him easily, Rumlow thinks. The soldier is sitting so close to him, on Rumlow’s left. Rumlow’s handgun is still in the holster on his belt, and even though his fingers twitch at the thought of it, he knows there’s no round in the chamber, and that unholstering and then firing would be borderline too slow to take down even a normal man at this range, let alone the soldier.

He moves on, keeps his thoughts focused even though the effort is almost painful. His other guns, as well as the stun baton, are in his bag, obviously too far away right now. That leaves only the knife that he also has on his belt: it’s a four-inch fixed blade, not ideal, but easy to draw and at this range probably a deadlier weapon than a handgun. Enough to slow the soldier down, at least. Probably.

He opens his eyes, takes a careful breath. The soldier hasn’t moved, although he might have already noticed Rumlow tensing up. The thought of being restrained again—allowing it to happen again—is too much.

Act now. Move.

Rumlow leans over forward, dropping his head, and says: “I feel sick.”

The soldier leans forward, too, seemingly more out of concern than caution. Regardless, Rumlow makes a show of elbowing him away, turning away at the same time as if he’s about to throw up. The soldier seems to fall for it, loosening his grip on Rumlow’s arm. It’s enough to successfully get a small amount of distance between them, at least. Rumlow steadies himself against the floor with his left hand, the other hand already hovering near his belt. There’s a brief, quiet moment of decision in which he takes in the patch of dull carpet on the floor in front of him.

Then he pulls the knife from its sheath, and in one upwards diagonal motion pulls it across his body and up into the soldier’s neck.

 

 

 

Chapter 22

Rumlow is surprised, for a moment, at how well it all works: the soldier jerks backwards towards the wall behind him, grabbing for the knife instead of for him, and even though the blade stutters along his skin without penetrating as deeply as he’d wanted, it still gives Rumlow a chance to move. He shoves himself up, unholstering his gun as he does it. He’ll to get to his feet first, and then turn and aim and shoot downwards.

He is almost upright when something hits his ankle, hard. He loses his balance, falling on his side onto the carpeted floor. It’s still okay, though: the gun is already in his hand, and there is a round in the chamber.

But as he turns around to aim the soldier is already there: sudden and close, his metal hand wrapping around Rumlow’s right wrist before clamping down like a machine. The pressure makes his grip fail, the gun sliding uselessly against his fingers, but what happens next is much worse: the soldier coils his fingers tighter around Rumlow’s wrist, and then yanks upward, pulling Rumlow’s arm up towards him with in one sudden, wrenching movement.

Something pops inside the flesh of his shoulder, and Rumlow screams. The gun falls to the floor with a muffled thud, and the soldier kicks it away. The next second his neck is enclosed in metal, and his chest crushed under new weight. The force of it pushes his upper body harder down into the carpet beneath him, and the impact is like something splitting every muscle in his shoulder in two.

Things go white for a second. He’s aware that the soldier is sitting on his chest, his human hand pinning Rumlow’s still-functional left arm. His left hand still encircles his neck: the metal fingers pressed into Rumlow’s throat are wet with warm blood. Half of the soldier’s body seems to be covered in it, and above all of this the soldier’s face looks genuinely furious.

Fourth mistake, Rumlow thinks: not spending enough time contemplating why you are scared of somebody before you decide to go and react to that fear.

He must be losing it from the pain, because the thought makes him laugh. Above him, the soldier sees it and looks even angrier.

“At least I got the drop on you for a minute,” Rumlow manages to force out, and then he laughs again.

The soldier’s eyes narrow, and the pressure on Rumlow’s neck increases, the hard metal cutting into either side of his throat. The soldier is not just holding him down anymore, he’s actively cutting off the bloodflow. When Rumlow squirms in an automatic effort to free himself, the movement only tears a new burst of agony from his shoulder. He can’t scream, even with the pain cutting into him like fingernails against nerves. His face feels flushed, heavy; all of him seems to be trapped under the force of constricting titanium.

The image above him is softening, narrowing, turning blurred and ghostlike. Everything—the pain, the new hollow wrongness in his mangled shoulder joint, the disgusting warmth of the soldier’s blood dripping onto his chest—starts to dim.

An unpleasant way to die, he thinks, but at least not a particularly slow one.

But of course, it doesn’t last. The soldier’s metal fingers relax, the pressure easing on the sides of his neck, although the grip doesn’t release altogether. Rumlow blinks, trying to get a hold on what’s happening. The soldier must be leaning further forward over him now, because more blood is dripping onto Rumlow’s face now: it’s getting into his eyes, his mouth. He’s still trapped, and now he is aware that he is probably not going to die right now, that this experience will outlast whatever rush of adrenaline and endorphins he still has circulating from just getting a limb disarticulated—

Rumlow tries to breathe. He needs to hold it together, force down all the panicky claustrophobia from the weight of the metal, the lingering smell of death on the soldier’s clothes. But the pain is so bad in his shoulder, and all he can taste is blood.

Hell, he thinks wildly. I am in hell.

The metal fingers on his neck shift again, slippery against his skin with the sweat and blood, and then abruptly let go. The other hand lets go of him as well, and the soldier sits upright.

His eyes have focused a bit better now: he can see the soldier above him, shadowed in front of the fluorescent lights on the ceiling. He is holding his human hand against his the side of his own bleeding neck, and there’s more blood all over that side of him, on his skin and clothing. Not much more blood seems to be coming out of his neck, though, and its color is dark enough to suggest that Rumlow had missed the artery.

Figures.

The soldier just sits for a moment, motionless while looking down at him, like he’s considering what to do. Now that Rumlow is free of the pressure on his own neck, he's finally able to lift his head enough to look down at himself, and he takes the opportunity to do so.

This is, unfortunately, another bad decision. Even through the layers of clothing, his shoulder looks deformed. The unnatural swollen area close to his upper chest—that must be the head of his humerus, an inch or two from where it’s supposed to be. It feels about the same as it looks.

He lets his head drop back onto the carpet, closing his eyes tight.

This turns out to only be a brief escape, barely lasting a few seconds before Rumlow senses the soldier moving above him in a way he doesn’t like. He opens his eyes in time to see the soldier has turned his upper body a little, and is carefully taking hold of Rumlow’s fucked-up right arm again, this time just above the elbow.

“No,” Rumlow says automatically, and the soldier ignores him.

The soldier slowly starts to raise the damaged arm, keeping his elbow straight and bending the joint at the shoulder. Rumlow squirms, twisting his body in a way that’s utterly useless with the soldier’s weight still on his chest. Something in his shoulder is already spasming in response to the movement: the hollow pulling sensation it causes is almost worse than the pain.

“No,” he says again, and he hates himself more for that than anything else, the weakness in his voice, the way the plea is completely ignored. The soldier continues steadily raising his arm until it’s almost perpendicular to the floor.

Time seems to move slowly now: Rumlow just watches, with a sense of vague, empty resignation. He could put up more of a struggle, fight him off—but it would just make things worse. He has been here before, pinned down and hurt like this: why the fuck should it be any different this time?

He tries to keep his breathing steady in the short moment of expectant silence.

Then the soldier pushes his arm down towards the floor with what seems like all his strength, and Rumlow screams again.

 

 

Being dragged back into corner of the room is less painful than it could have been—the soldier, at least, doesn’t pull him by the arms, which is a thought that makes Rumlow want to laugh, despite himself. But it’s still a deeply unpleasant experience, and when the soldier lets him go Rumlow can’t do much more than roll onto his side.

His head is throbbing, his teeth are starting to chatter. He spits onto the floor to try to get the taste of blood out of his mouth, an undignified action that doesn’t achieve much. An attempt to wipe his mouth just spreads more blood all over more of his face. 

The soldier seems to be elsewhere in the room for now. Rumlow’s brain is starting to work slightly better, enough to be more aware of the rest of his body. His clothes are unpleasantly damp with sweat and blood, and he can't tell if the shaking is from the injury or the cold. His arm tucked in pathetically against his torso. There's a low, raw pain still spreading out from his right shoulder. The bone is back in place, but something in his rotator cuff has been fucked up; it’s just a question of how bad. He wonders, bleakly, how much medical attention it might require, although of course that thought contains the optimistic assumption that he might ever leave this fucking place.

He looks up dully as the soldier appears next to him again, sitting down right next to Rumlow and leaning his back against the wall. His metal hand is against his neck now; his other hand rests on his knee almost casually. The utter lack of caution in his posture stings, on top of everything else that has just happened. He hadn’t even bothered to sit between Rumlow and the door.

Had the soldier actually been reacting slowly when he stabbed him, he wonders. Maybe the soldier had held off deliberately. Maybe he just wanted what he did next to be more memorable.

After a few seconds of Rumlow glaring up at him from the floor, the soldier finally speaks, although he keeps his eyes fixed in front of him as he does it. “You should lie down there for a while,” he says. “You’re not well.”

For fuck’s sake, Rumlow thinks. 

“Yeah, I’m not well,” he coughs out. He has to pause and take a breath to make his voice come out properly. “You think that has anything to do with you breaking my fucking arm?”

“It’s not broken,” the soldier says.

“Fuck you.”

The soldier finally turns his head to look at him. His neck definitely seems to have stopped bleeding, although his hand is still held tight against it. He pauses for a long moment, looking almost surprised now, as if he’s taking Rumlow in for the first time.

“I’m sorry,” he says finally. “I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t want you to hurt yourself.”

He speaks like it's a genuine apology, and Rumlow can only close his eyes in response, because he has no way of carrying out any of his preferred, more violent reactions. Of course. Of fucking course he acts like this. Rumlow can’t even have the satisfaction of being beat down by a worthy enemy. Can’t even kid himself that it's like that. No, everything that had just happened to him had been at the hands of this pathetic piece of shit.

He starts to sit up. Disgust, it seems, is relatively good at fueling action even when you're exhausted, although once he’s upright he still has to pause and lean forward until his head stops spinning. He feels faintly nauseous.

“Be careful,” the soldier says, and he leans forward like he’s going to grab him to help. “Don’t—”

“Fuck off,” Rumlow says, and he’s pleasantly surprised at how much energy there is in his voice. “Fuck. Off,” he says. “Do you really not understand? I don’t want your help.”

“I’m just—”

“I’m done with you, soldier. I’m done. It doesn’t matter if I’m sick or injured. It’s still the most logical fucking decision for me to try to be far away from you, because you are fucking useless.”

The soldier stares at him. He seems genuinely surprised at the words, and it’s the first vaguely pleasant sight he’s had in a while, so he keeps going. “Why do you think you keep fucking up? Your brain isn’t set up to last. You’re disposable. You’re barely supposed to last a week or two. That’s why they kept wiping you.”

The soldier keeps staring at him, looking confused, like he’s trying to filter what he's hearing through whatever is left of his brain. The silence lasts long enough to fuel a small flicker of hope that maybe this will do more than just get the soldier to shut up: maybe it will actually change his mind. He hates how weak and dependent that hope is. He hates that all he can do now is talk, while the soldier just sits there like a moron and looks like he is going to cry.

“You—you said you wouldn’t send me to anyone else,” the soldier says finally. He looks upset, but his tone is not as whiny as the words: he speaks like he is trying to solve a problem he doesn't understand.

“Yeah, and I was right to say that. I wouldn’t send you to my worst enemy, soldier. Palming you off on someone would be worse torture than even I've got a stomach for.”

The soldier glares at him for a second, and then looks down at the floor, scowling. Rumlow goes on: “In fact once I’m gone, you’re better off eating a fucking bullet and putting yourself out of your misery along with all the—”

“I know what you’re doing,” the soldier says sharply, cutting him off, and Rumlow stops. The soldier’s eyes are still fixed on the floor. He is breathing a bit deeper than usual and still scowling, but the upset expression on his face from before is gone.

“You’re trying to make me mad at you, so I’ll let you leave,” he goes on. “It won’t work. It’s nothing I don’t know already.”

Rumlow doesn’t know how to answer that: the sensation upon hearing the words is remarkably like being choked again. The soldier doesn't seem to be confused anymore, and even covered in blood he looks remarkably calm.

Rumlow just sits there stupidly, and then the soldier stands up.

“I’ll be right back,” he says. “Stay here, commander." The second phrase seems so unnecessary it's almost like he's making fun of him.

 

 

Rumlow doesn’t go anywhere in the ten seconds the soldier is out of the room. Doesn’t even try to stand up, and he despises himself for it. The soldier seems to have removed his handgun from the room, as well as Rumlow's bag—that must have been what he was doing right after he dragged Rumlow back into this corner—but there are plenty of other things in this room that could be used as weapons. He could, at least, make an effort to stand up.

He doesn’t. He tells himself it’s because it’s pointless right now. That it’s just a timing thing, and that he has to wait until he's in a better condition. It doesn't work. 

The soldier comes back holding what looks like an office first-aid kit. He grabs a bottle of water off a desk on his way back too, and then sets both items down on the floor as he sits down next to Rumlow. The kit has a triangular bandage inside, and Rumlow lets the soldier tie it around his neck to make a sling. He’s almost surprised that the soldier doesn’t start trying to wipe the blood off his face too, but maybe it’s because he senses how much Rumlow already wants to hit him.

“I can bring you some clean clothes from your bag,” the soldier says. “But you might have trouble getting them on with—”

“I don’t get it,” Rumlow cuts him off. “Why are you doing this.”

He dislikes the question even as it is coming out. It’s a weak question, the kind of question a person asks when they’re about to be killed. It’s something he has been asked before, by a few poor bastards who didn’t know exactly why they’d gotten on the bad side of Pierce or some other higher-up.

Still, Rumlow doesn’t mean it the same way now. He’s not trying to provoke guilt, or mercy. He just genuinely doesn’t fucking get it.

“I already told you,” the soldier says. He leans back against the wall again. The first-aid kit next to him has plenty of bandages and disinfectant wipes, but he doesn’t seem to notice these exist: he just rests his hand back on top of the laceration that runs along his neck, holds it there like it’s comforting. “It’s not safe for you to go outside by yourself—”

“Not that, you dumb fuck. That’s not a reason. You’ve killed people before. You killed people in this building before.” The soldier opens his mouth like he’s going to deny that again, but Rumlow ignores it. “You don’t follow my orders properly anymore. You didn’t follow my orders even before this, so you aren’t obliged to protect me anymore. Why the fuck do you care if I get hurt?”

The soldier looks up at Rumlow briefly, then back down at the floor. He looks pale; Rumlow sees his jaw clench. “I told you,” he says flatly. “I lov—”

“No. Don’t say it. Please, fuck, don’t say it again.”

“You asked me.”

Rumlow wants to hit him. Like it's his fault for not knowing just how bad the soldier can make things.

"Just shut the fuck up,” he says. It comes out too much like a plea.

He had been kidding himself. Those people who had asked why are you doing this hadn’t really wanted an answer, and Rumlow doesn’t want an answer either. Turns out he’s no better than them.

“I can’t help it,” the soldier says. He seems to mean it, which just makes everything worse.

“I don’t love you,” Rumlow says. It’s distasteful to say it, even in the negative.

”I know,” he says, quieter. “I told you, I’m not stupid.”

Rumlow can only look at him. He doesn’t have anything else to say.

I could hit him, he thinks. I could beat him up right now, as much as is possible with my arm fucked up like this, anyway.

The image is perfectly clear in his mind, almost tantalizingly so. The soldier would just go limp and let it happen. Would probably let Rumlow do whatever the fuck he wanted to him, as much as he wanted. All the way up until Rumlow tried to leave again.

He feels himself slump over a little. He is so tired. More than tired. There’s a new heaviness spreading in his body, dull and cold, a deep emptiness behind the cold and the pain.

“Have some water,” the soldier says. And then, again: “You should lie down again. You’re not well.”

It's almost hard to process the meaning, or the fact that the soldier is repeating the same words. He feels, again, like he is not really here. Like the world, even his own body, is too far away.

Pierce tried to warn him, he thinks. About the way you needed to handle the soldier. Pierce had told him directly—just be careful, Mr Rumlow—but Pierce had also made his thoughts on the subject clear just from the way he’d acted around the soldier, the way he clearly never fell for the soldier’s manipulation. And even Pierce’s superior methods still hadn’t been enough to stop the soldier ruining things.

But Rumlow? He had ignored every warning, every piece of advice. He had thought he knew better. 

The soldier gives him the bottle of water, and he takes it from him and drinks without the energy to do anything else. He really does want to lie down again, even though the thought brings to mind men he has seen who wanted to lie down to rest after they were shot or stabbed. Like it’s a shortcut to dying.

Would that really be any worse, though?

He doesn’t resist as he is guided to lie down onto his side, as something that must be a folded blanket is pushed under his head. He’s too tired to complain, and it’s easier just not to think about any of it. Lying here seems, like everything else that has happened, inevitable.

It’s not that bad, he tells himself as he feels the hard cardboard under him, cold seeping through it like it's coming up from the buried soil underneath. It’s just for now. I can figure out something tomorrow. But that doesn’t work, not anymore.

The soldier must get up to turn off the lights, although Rumlow barely notices. He only feels it as the soldier lies down behind him in the new dark, between Rumlow and the wall. He’s close already—this area had been set up for only one person to sleep in—and then he moves even closer to wrap his arms around him from behind. He’s careful about not jostling Rumlow's shoulder too badly, but his arms still close around him tight in a way that seems almost suffocating. Rumlow smells blood, death. It’s on both of their clothes.

Hell, the thinks again. I am in hell. His surroundings are too far away to hold onto, and this time he wonders if the thought is actually true. Maybe this is all some vivid death-hallucination, a fantasy playing out instead of his life flashing before his eyes, some type of stretched-out punishment—

His shoulder aches in this new position, down in his bones, although the pain seems distant now. The soldier is so close, pressed against him and arms firm around him. Maybe it’s for warmth, he can’t tell, just that the weight is heavy across his body and he is pinned. He has been here before. It all just feels inevitable, like falling.

It’s very dark, and silent. He lies there, and in this position and with everything else gone he can admit to himself that maybe he has been in this position, pinned exactly like this, for a long time now.

He closes his eyes against the thought, and the soldier holds him tighter.