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Jack stood behind Brock and tried to remain impassive as Alexander Pierce politely, professionally, and terrifyingly bawled them out. Nobody was going to get disappeared for this, at least. The mission - a four-day surveillance rotation capped by a single long-range gunshot - had been a success. No, this wasn’t a dressing-down because of a failure in the field. This was a dressing down about Captain Fucking America.
“He has been training with your team for three months, and neither of you have made any effort to get closer to him or invited him to get closer to you. He could be pivotal in upcoming projects, and both of you are intelligent enough to know that it would be a tremendous waste to lose him.”
It would not do to roll his eyes at Alexander Pierce. It would be a bad idea for Jack to protest that they - both he and Brock, as well as three other members of STRIKE Alpha - had reached out to Rogers, and had been turned away every time.
“He’s isolating himself,” Brock said. “He doesn’t want friends, sir. Pushing him won’t make him warm up, it’ll make him suspicious.”
“Don’t give me excuses,” Pierce snapped. “Give me results. He is isolating himself. He’s vulnerable. I refuse to believe that nobody on your team can be charming enough to entice Rogers into getting a drink. He’s got to be interested in spending more time with one of you. If you can’t manufacture something, shoot someone and let him rescue them. I don’t want him going to waste.”
Jack gritted his teeth and watched the second hand on the clock sweeping in a circle. Pierce had given them their orders, the same orders they’d had for months, and it was humiliating that they’d made less than zero progress. At this point it was pretty clear that Rogers wasn’t just uninterested in friends, but that he actively disliked them, and seemed to dislike Jack most of all.
He’d actually gotten further than anyone else, which was the really embarrassing part. Rogers appreciated that Jack was reserved and didn’t engage in the roughhousing and pranks the rest of the team had made a constant in the quinjet and the locker room. He’d talked to Jack a couple of times. He’d asked if Jack knew of a good local tailor once, and had had a quiet conversation about cubism with him on a long flight to Paris. And then one day all the little cues, the half-smiles and shared eye contact and exasperation with the frat-boy mood of the team had dried up. And Jack didn’t have a single clue why. The best he could figure was that Rogers just lost interest and fell back into his depressive spiral. Jack had even brought up art a couple of times, but he got nothing back. Trying to make friends with Rogers was like trying to scale a concrete wall with your fingernails, if the wall thought that it was better than you.
Pierce sneered at them and insulted them for another ten minutes, then sent Brock and Jack away with instructions to write up a timeline for the debrief before they did anything else. It ended up taking two hours while both of them checked each other's notes and slowly sweated through their cold-weather gear in the office, which was about sixty degrees warmer than what their clothing was rated for. By the end of the whole production Jack wasn’t feeling chastened so much as furious. He hadn’t showered, he hadn’t eaten, he hadn’t had a chance to sit down by himself and be pissed about Pierce lecturing him like a disappointed father.
So when he and Brock finally, finally , made it to the locker room to start stripping out of their wilderness gear he was not precisely thrilled to hear deep, thumping bass coming from the showers. Brock shot him a stricken look. He’d been on duty a full twelve hours before the mission had even started. Jack waved his hand and nodded wearily.
“Use the gym showers on the third floor. I’ve got this.”
“Fuck you,” Brock growled, his I’m-in-command mask slipping into place. “I’m in charge of these assholes.”
Jack shrugged out of his coat. “Yeah, but they’re more scared of me. I’ve got it. You go shower. I’ll see you Monday.”
For a moment, Brock looked like he was going to be stubborn about it, then the stiffness went out of his shoulders. “You’ll call me if you can’t handle it.”
“I’ll be able to handle it,” Jack said.
Tony wasn’t quite flying in circles around the quinjet, but he was in the kind of mood that made him want to.
It was a good day. Steve and Barnes had called Tony in when they found a HYDRA base and it had been a cakewalk. There had been a few deadly booby traps to fight past, but Steve’s leg would heal in a day or two and none of the gas had even gotten past Tony’s mask. The base had been a treasure trove, too. There was a ton of documentation about the original Soviet arm and how Barnes had been programmed. Tony had put Jarvis to work on codifying the huge pile of data they had found. Everyone was hopeful that this would be the last of the bases they had to destroy - with this, maybe they were finally done fighting HYDRA.
So Tony was in a good mood. Things had gone well. Mission success.
He was even starting to get along with Barnes a little better. It had been hard at first. Obviously. You didn't just get over the fact that someone killed your parents. But apparently you also didn't just get over seventy years of captivity.
They were working on it. He was doing breathing exercises and writing in a gratitude journal. Pepper was very proud of him.
And things got better after each mission like this. He and Barnes could harass Steve for being reckless. He and Steve could patch up their broken friendship by nurturing Steve's feral murder kitten back to health. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement.
It wasn't an overture that Tony had expected after the way things had ended between all of them. Steve had insisted that it was Barnes who had wanted to bring Tony into the loop. Tony didn't believe it until he'd been alone with the other man outside the infirmary after Steve had barreled through a wall and straight into a seven storey fall.
"I need you to stick with us," Barnes had said, quiet enough that Tony could have imagined it.
"What?"
"When he was smaller, I could take care of him," Barnes grumbled, clutching the arm of his chair and slowly pulverizing it. "But now he's just too much idiot for one person to handle. So. I know you hate me. I don't blame you. But I need someone else who's strong enough to keep him in line."
Tony's face had split open on a grin. He'd handed Barnes a notepad and pen to rescue the chair from the metal hand, and they'd started strategizing on the best ways to guilt Steve into taking care of himself.
They had a post-mission routine down now, which helped. Steve had been in the habit of not caring for himself so much that he needed regular reminders that he had something to live for. So after every HYDRA hunting party they asked Stark to join in on, they would land at the Tower, check in with the infirmary for anyone who needed it, cool down and clean up, and then watch a stupid action movie.
Tony headed straight for the equipment room and divested himself of the suit while Bucky got Steve settled in the infirmary. Once nobody had any smoke stains or potential patches of toxic gas residue on his skin they could all settle in to watch Die Hard and see if they could get Steve high on painkillers.
Even if there hadn't been a fight, flying the suit for hours was a hell of a workout. Tony peeled himself out of his neoprene bodysuit and walked to the locker room, thinking fondly of his endless reservoir of hot water.
After one look at the bullshit in the showers, Jack pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. Pierce was giving them too much credit. Every member of the STRIKE team was an unlikable asshole.
They were gathered in a loose circle around the Soldier, cheering obnoxiously as the poor, stupid Asset clumsily danced in the center. Murphy had dragged out his waterproof Bluetooth speaker and was blasting some fucking terrible hair metal song.
Most of the team were wearing towels but Higgins was in the corner hosing off. The water at his feet was suspiciously red, and as the Soldier turned and stumbled, Jack saw why. The Soldier was only clumsy when it was fresh from cryo or it was badly injured. The amount of blood running down its thighs indicated that it was pretty seriously injured.
"Did you fucking faggots break the goddamned Asset?" Jack bellowed while slamming the door closed as hard as he could. Everybody except the Soldier jumped about a foot. Nobody had told the Asset to stop, so it kept awkwardly twisting and moving with the song.
"It was an accident," Vasquez said.
Higgins was frantically scrabbling for a towel, Murphy's face had turned dead white, and Smith looked like he was thinking of running for the door. The rest of them seemed like they were trying their hardest to sink into the grout. The stupid song started over and the Asset dropped to its knees and danced there, writhing like a stripper as it followed some routine.
"Someone turn the fucking music off, and tell me what the hell is happening," Jack growled. "I just spent two hours doing paperwork for your dumb asses and another half an hour getting chewed out by Pierce, so someone had better have a good explanation for this." He pointed at the vague circle of livid red splatters on the floor around the Asset.
Murphy fumbled with his speaker and the music cut off. The Assent froze like someone had pressed a pause button in its brain. It was crouched on spread legs with its hands splayed on the ground between its knees and its chest pressed forward, looking slutty and ready to push itself into a standing position. Jack walked around it. When he got behind the Soldier he squatted and looked between its legs.
It was a mess. There were long rivulets of blood running down its legs. Its hole was puffy and swollen and was an alarming red-maroon color. As it breathed something pulsed out of the hole for a moment before it slipped back inside. Jack's skin was crawling and his blood was boiling.
"What the fuck is going on here?" he said, keeping his voice low and deadly.
Nobody seemed inclined to speak up.
"Soldier, report on the last two hours," Jack ground out.
The creepy thing didn't even move out of its bowed-back slut pose to talk.
"I cleaned, cataloged and stored my weapons. I was instructed to clean myself as well, with special emphasis on getting that whore pussy clean enough to eat out of. My designated temporary handler gave me instructions to service the team members who required it. After servicing five team members I experienced mechanical failure due to abrasion. Three remaining team members required oral service. One found my slut hole acceptable. The final team member was able to achieve orgasm in my loose cunt but needed further stimulation and inserted his fist into my anus. My useless fucking pussy was inadequate for the task and tore, before partial prolapse on withdrawal. I was informed that I now have a real cherry pie and should learn how to act like it. I was shown an instructional video and have been replicating the training to the best of my ability, with corrections as needed."
Jack *hated* it when the Soldier was out of storage. His normally very reasonable, competent coworkers couldn't be regular people around it. Even Brock started acting gay with it, letting it suck his cock or bending it over in the lab. And now Higgins had stuck his fucking hand up the thing? It was like it emitted gay roofies or something. If you left it alone with a perfectly normal person for long enough they'd suddenly turn into a pervert.
He hated it.
"Soldier, do you require medical attention?"
This was going to be the turning point in Jack's day. If these assholes had injured the Soldier badly enough that it needed a surgical repair he'd just start shooting.
"No, sir. Estimated time to 100% functionality with no intervention is four hours."
"Everybody get the fuck out," Jack said. "Your job this weekend is to think of how you can improve your field performance so much that I won't report you for this."
There was a rush for the door, with much squeaking of skin against tile. Wisely, nobody said anything as they struggled to get out the door before Jack changed his mind about shooting everyone.
The door swung closed and left behind the sound of dripping water. Jack was alone with the Asset.
Tony loved hot water. He loved expensive soaps and cushioned shower mats, even in the shared locker room shower. But right now, most of all, he loved having Jarvis to queue up cock rock for him to sing in the shower so he had something to do with all the energy buzzing around under his skin.
"I'm hot, sticky sweet, from my head down to my feet," he sang, then jumped when Barnes shouted over the sound of the water.
"You drowning a cat in there, Stark?"
"I've heard about choking the bishop, but that's a new one on me," Tony quipped back.
"Something is choking, that's for sure," Barnes said, and then shut up when he turned the water on in his own stall.
Tony couldn't let it go that easily, of course, and gestured for Jarvis to turn up the tunes. Barnes punctuated the next two songs - Mötley Crüe and Cinderella - with sarcastic commentary. There wasn't much that Tony could do to retort, mostly because he didn't know any Cinderella songs well enough to make puns out of them. But then the playlist delivered.
“He’s my cyborg guy - tall drink of water, he’ll shoot out your eye! Aims so good he doesn’t have to try, my cyborg guy,” Tony caterwauled, waiting for the unbearably pained groan that was sure to elicit from Barnes. If it annoyed him enough, Tony would write out the rest of the verses and have Jarvis match his lyrics to the original track then save it as Barnes’s ringtone.
Tony didn’t hear a response, so he sang his - actually very good now that he thought about it - version of the lyrics twice more during the second chorus. There was a weird clanking sound, but otherwise no response.
“C’mon,” Tony shouted over the water and the guitar solo. “Don’t I even get a ‘fuck you, Stark’? I worked on that for at least twelve seconds.”
The second verse started. Tony shut off the water and reached for his towel.
He didn’t know what was so fucking special about the Asset. He walked around it again and looked to see if there was anything he had missed.
It was beautiful, its body was very nice and it had a soft, slightly open mouth. Its damp hair was thick and soft. It was fine. Great, even, but it wasn’t more appealing than any random influencer on Instagram or the average Eastern European fashion model trying to make it in the US. There were a million desperate, beautiful people in the world and if you were someone with power - and why else would you join HYDRA except for the power? - they would throw themselves at your feet and you didn’t even have to buy them dinner first.
Even if you were a queer, there was nothing particularly special about the Asset. Was it the bonding aspect? Was fucking the thing with the team standing around like sharing a case of beer at a football game? Maybe nobody cared it was male for the same reason nobody ever bitched when Vasquez showed up with Rolling Rock during the playoffs. The flavor didn’t matter if you were drinking to be companionable instead of for taste.
Jack wouldn’t know. He didn’t drink.
He tried to make himself get horny for it. He could fuck basically any woman if he had enough time to convince himself he liked her tits. He looked at the Soldier’s chest. Its lips. The dip of its spine that swelled into its ass.
Nothing.
Maybe he wasn’t even bothered by the fact that it had a dick, maybe it was the fact that it was sitting there staring at him like a cow looking at a train bearing down on it. Hadn’t this stupid thing been Bucky Barnes once?
Jack reached out and gathered its hair in his hand, pulling it up and away from its face. The cheekbones, drawn brow, and cleft chin were the same ones that thousand-yard-stared out of every history textbook in America, but instead of the steely sniper’s eyes there might as well have been static. It could kill out of muscle memory, but there wasn’t anything going on in its head these days.
He dropped its hair and glared at it.
Rogers went running past Arlington three times a week. Jack knew that, because he’d tried to play nice with him, tried to join him on his run to get to know him better. Rogers had brushed him off, and said that nobody in their right mind wanted to get up at four to go running by a cemetery.
Jack was suddenly pretty convinced that Rogers’ weird routine had less to do with getting in the exercise that he didn’t need and more to do with gazing miserably at the statue of Bucky Barnes.
Pierce was right. There was someone on Jack’s team who was charming enough that Rogers would want to spend time with him. It made him hugely, irrationally furious.
“What does he like about you?” Jack asked, and kicked the Soldier’s knees wider apart. “Is it the blank stare?” Jack slapped the Soldier’s cheek and it moved with the blow, putting up absolutely no resistance.
“What about the others? Are you a charming conversationalist when they’re fucking you?” He slapped it again and it stayed as empty and dumb as a porcelain doll.
“Does Brock keep you close because of your cunning tactical mind?” This time Jack shoved its shoulder hard enough that it was tipped backwards and fell, splay-legged in front of him.
“Does Pierce keep you out of the freezer for your keen sense of diplomacy?” Jack aimed a kick between its legs. It whined, and rolled over. The toe of Jack’s boot came back bloody and sticky with come. He bent down and grabbed the Asset’s hair again, getting a good grip on it and dragging it along with its heels kicking at the ground and its hand wrapped around his wrist until he flung it against the tiled wall of the shower.
It looked different now. There was more fear and less static in its eyes.
“What’s so fucking special about you?” Jack roared at it, and kicked between its legs again, this time aiming high enough to hit its balls instead of its messy hole. It squeaked and curled up to cover itself. It looked at Jack through its wet hair and its eyes were wide and terrified.
He couldn’t make himself understand it, and he hated it. He didn’t know why Rogers cared about this dead thing, he didn’t know why his team was obsessed with it to the point of destruction. He didn’t know why Pierce kept thawing it when it cost so much to maintain and there were other snipers in the world. He loathed the thing’s whole presence and its inexplicable gravity.
He put his hand in its hair again. He’d try one more time. One last time to understand. He slammed the back of its head against the tile, and was gratified by how it flinched, and the tiny gasp of pain that rose up from it.
It whined in fear, and that made something dark and hungry flip over in Jack’s stomach. He used his free hand to pull the front of his pants open and draw his cock out.
“Are you afraid?” He asked it, and tears ran down its cheeks when it blinked mindlessly up at him.
Its eyes were soft and frightened, its mouth was open and panting, but there still wasn’t anything there. Jack might as well have been threatening a dog.
He squeezed his cock and growled, trying to make this something he could get hard for. It shuddered under his hands and remained just as stupid and unappealing as it had ever been.
This thing. This dull, hollow thing, was more important to HYDRA, to Steve Rogers, and even to Brock than Jack would ever be.
“Open your mouth,” he growled at it. When it complied he relaxed, and began to piss on its face with a grunt.
It didn’t even blink.
This thing was less human than the statue Rogers ran past at Arlington. This wasn’t a person, it was a urinal. He finished, and wiped his dick on its chin where the rasp of stubble on sensitive skin sent a shiver up his spine.
“Swallow,” Jack said.
It didn’t hesitate. It was even easier than flushing a toilet.
Jack let go of its hair with a disgusted sneer. “Turn on the shower and clean yourself off,” he barked. “You’re disgusting.”
“I’m sorry,” the Soldier said in a tiny voice.
That made Jack pause. It was the first time he’d ever heard it speak without a direct order.
“What was that?”
“I’m sorry,” the Soldier said. Its dead-fish eyes stared through him. It wasn’t standing up to clean itself, it wasn’t looking at its handler. It barely seemed to be in the room. “I’m sorry,” it said again.
Jack belatedly remembered that the thing had a prolapsed anus and he’d just spent five minutes kicking the shit out of it. It was a stupid, broken doll and he’d been rattling it around like a child throwing a tantrum. Whatever weird pull it exerted was beyond Jack’s comprehension, but that was also above Jack’s pay grade. What he was paid to worry about were the physical integrity and functionality of the Asset, which had been compromised when he first got here and were compromised worse now.
“I’m sorry,” the Soldier said again, staring at nothing and speaking to no one.
Jack sighed and pulled the phone out of his pocket to dial Brock. It turned out that he couldn’t actually handle this on his own.
Tony would probably never forgive himself for laughing.
It’s just that - well - there were some things you never thought you’d see the Winter Soldier doing, and one of those things was a skeevy Vegas-stripper-style floorshow set to Warrant. It was absurd.
And then Barnes threw his head back in a classic Flashdance move, wet hair and all, and Tony saw the blankness on his face and the tears in his eyes.
“Jesus Christ,” Tony whispered. “Jay, stop, stop the music.”
The room went silent, with only the sound of Barnes’s shower hissing through the air. Tony leaned past him and flipped the handle up, trying not to look directly at where Barnes was kneeling on the floor and panting with his mouth open and his eyes glazed.
There was a stack of towels next to the door. Tony grabbed one and tossed it on top of Barnes, who didn’t even try to hold it in place or cover himself with it.
“Barnes?”
He didn’t look up or move, just stayed on his knees panting. Tony crouched down in front of him, and he might as well have been on the moon, because Barnes was just looking right through him.
“Barnes?” He shook the other man’s metal shoulder, and the wide, frightened eyes seemed to gain a little bit of focus and a lot more fear.
“James?” Tony said softly, and finally, finally, James seemed to see him.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered in a tiny voice.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m sorry,” he said again. He sounded tiny, lost and childish.
“Do you know where you are?”
“I’m sorry,” James said, and tears ran down his face as he blinked.
“Hey, that’s okay,” Tony said. He lifted up the towel that he’d clumsily tossed over Barnes and arranged it firmly around his waist. “Don’t worry about it, Robocop. We’ll figure it out.”
“I’m sorry,” James said again.
“Me too,” Tony answered. He didn’t know that there was anything else to say.