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“You’re wasting your time,” Sam says calmly. “I don’t think his arm’s removable. Dude even showers with it. Which is a good thing, ‘cause let me tell you, his pit sweat stinks up the whole car, and it’s just as bad on the left as it is on the right—”
The backhand that he receives catches his lip against his upper tooth. He resists the urge to spit the blood at their captor, a stocky asshole with ‘roided-out muscles and just enough dark fuzz on his pale head to make it clear that he shaves in an attempt to hide his severely receded hairline.
“I know it comes off,” Asshole insists. “Just fuckin’ tell me how to do it and I’ll let you go. I’m getting it no matter what, so you might as well just make it easy on yourself, yeah?”
Sam licks away the blood, taking a deep breath. The knockout gas that Asshole used to get the jump on him and Bucky in the “abandoned” HYDRA base has mostly worn off of him, but his head still aches something fierce, an acrid burn at the back of his throat and nose.
He feels uncomfortably exposed, stripped down to the shorts and t-shirt he had under the suit. The suit itself is piled in a corner; the two Redwings he brought with him disabled by whatever electromagnetic pulse had preceded the knockout gas. Both of them are probably to be stripped down for their vibranium components. That’s what Asshole seems to be after, though he hasn’t done Sam the favor of monologuing about his exact motivations and affiliations yet.
Heavy metal cuffs dig into Sam’s bare wrists and ankles. He suspects they’re identical to the ones pinning Bucky down in the opposite chair, ten feet or so in front of him. Leftover tech, custom designed for the Winter Soldier.
They’re old, if that’s the case. Could have design flaws, plus Bucky has bulked up a lot; what held him back then won’t necessarily be enough to keep him now.
But all that is beside the point, with the mask still firmly strapped to Bucky’s face, feeding him a constant stream of the gas that knocked them both unconscious.
Sam thinks—hopes—that Bucky is starting to burn through it. He’s seen Bucky’s fingers twitch a bit when Asshole was facing Sam. And he thought he saw Bucky open his eyes just a tiny bit to take in the surroundings, though most of his attention had been consumed by Asshole’s angry rant about how he’s gonna get his hands on Bucky’s arm one way or another.
So. Bucky is maybe slowly struggling his way back to the waking world. They haven’t sent updates to Torres in… two, maybe three hours, so by now he’s probably realized something is wrong, and must be working on getting a team over here.
Sam just has to keep buying them time. Run his mouth for a little while longer.
He can do that.
“I’m not fucking with you,” Sam says. “Why would I know if it comes off? We just work together.”
“You’re partners,” spits Asshole, which is true in more than one sense of the word. Not that anyone besides a select few know that. “You gotta know how to disarm him in case he goes all mad dog on you. Be fucking stupid if you didn’t.”
“Ha,” Sam says, and smiles his widest, most charming smile. He hopes there’s still a bit of blood on his teeth. “That’s pretty funny.”
Asshole stares at him.
“You said ‘disarm,’” Sam says. “Y’know. ‘Cause it’s his arm? I gotta hand it to you—ha, ‘hand’—that’s a good one—”
Asshole’s face turns a shade of red usually reserved for the ripest of tomatoes. “Fuck you, you fucking—I don’t have time for this.”
He kneels down, picking up something from the floor.
Sam has about three seconds to wonder if maybe the puns were a step too far. That’s how long it takes for his brain to interpret the input it’s currently receiving from his eyes. Namely, that the thing in Asshole’s hands is, in fact, a blowtorch.
Fuck.
“All right, let’s just calm down here,” he says. “The jokes didn’t land, that’s on me. I promise I got better material—”
“Shut up,” snaps Asshole. “One. More. Time. How do I get the arm off?”
“I can’t help you, man, I’m sorry—”
The soft hiss of gas fills the room for just a moment before Sam’s own screams drown it out. And then he isn’t hearing anything at all, because his entire world is white-hot searing pain, a strip of concentrated agony running the length of his calf and burning straight through the muscle, to the bone, maybe, and Christ, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, it hurts.
Sam regains his senses through sheer force of will, biting down hard on his lip and screwing his eyes shut tight enough to briefly stem the automatic tide of tears. His chest heaves, embarrassing little whimpers slipping out the back of his throat. His head and stomach alike are spinning, his senses struggling to connect the scent like burned meat that hangs in the air to the hurt so overwhelming it almost feels separate from his body.
Focus. He has to focus.
Asshole is swearing up a storm, and there’s another sound—something muffled but frantic—
Sam blinks his eyes open, clearing away the tears as best he can.
Bucky is no longer pretending to be more out of it than he actually is. In the chair across from Sam, he thrashes back and forth, trying to scrape his head against his shoulder or the chair’s back, doing everything that he can to dislodge the mask pumping a steady stream of knockout gas into his lungs. Even through his still-blurred vision, Sam can see the whites of his eyes flashing frantically as he rattles against the cuffs with half his normal strength.
“Motherfucker—he should still be out, why the fuck—”
Sam wheezes out a laugh in spite of himself.
“His metabolism’s crazy. Dude can eat a whole pack of bacon and be hungry an hour later—” and god, why’d he have to go and mention bacon, sizzling meat above a gas burner, fat bubbling out as it crisps up—
Fuck. Bacon being ruined probably isn’t the worst thing that’s gonna come out of this shitty, shitty afternoon, but it’s definitely up there.
“Shut up! Shut up, do you want more of this—” He waves the blowtorch uncomfortably close to Sam’s face, and he flinches away from the pale blue that emanates from the tip.
“Save the medium-rare thing for some burgers,” Sam says, the words sounding a lot better in his head than they do out loud. “I can’t help you. The arm doesn’t come off, at least not that I know of. Fry me all you want, my answer’s not gonna change because it can’t.”
Across from him, Bucky shakes his head. The sounds he’s making from beneath the mask are too muffled for Sam to comprehend, but he thinks he gets the gist.
Give him the arm, is what Bucky is trying to convey. Because he’d rather give a part of himself up than watch Sam get hurt again.
The thing is, Asshole is exactly fucking right. Once Bucky got back into Wakanda’s good graces and had a long, private talk with Shuri and Ayo, he’d taken Sam aside one night and taught him how to take the arm off.
“In case I ever try to use it against you,” he’d said, his face grim and jaw tense. Sam had wanted to object, but he knew just from looking at Bucky that it would be a long argument that would upset them both, and which he would eventually end up losing. So he’d opted to stand down, and let Bucky guide his fingers into the right position to unlock the arm from its socket over and over again, like a child learning to play piano scales, until he knew the sequence blind.
And by that point, Bucky had been pale with sweat beading his brow, and had kept insisting that Sam do it one more time so that he could be certain he knew how, until Sam had finally put his foot down and refused. And then they’d gotten take-out and spent the rest of the night spooning on the couch, which at least Asshole doesn’t know about.
But right now, it’s not even about the fact that removing the arm would trigger something bad in Bucky’s head. No, even through the sick haze of pain, Sam knows that Asshole won’t just let them go when he gets Bucky’s arm—and Bucky knows it too, or would know it, if the knockout gas and the sight of Sam being tortured weren’t clouding his judgment.
Sam just has to keep stalling for a little while longer. Torres should be here any minute; there’s no way Asshole was smart enough to disable the trackers in the suit, and they should’ve survived the electromagnetic pulse that took out Redwing. Probably.
“It can, it can, it can, it can, it can,” Asshole chants, his face a lurid pink all the way up to his balding head. “Tell me or I’ll—”
Instead of explaining to Sam when he’ll do, Asshole points the blowtorch down and triggers the flame straight into the center of Sam’s knee.
Sam screams. Logically and distantly, he recognizes that Asshole pulls the blowtorch away after only a few seconds. But the pain is far more concentrated than the burnt strip of his calf, an arrow of fire piercing a bullseye halfway to the underside of his leg.
“Tell me!”
Asshole jams his thumb into the burnt hole. Sam turns his head to the side and vomits, mind empty except for white sparks of pain that burst inside his brain like dying neurons, everywhere searing, everywhere burning.
“Biometrics,” he chokes out. The word comes half-obscured in a sob, and he’s speaking without really knowing what he’s saying. “It’s biometrically locked. I can’t tell you how to take off the arm because it’s programmed only to come off for certain people. Let me up and I’ll get it off for you.”
Through the tears in his eyes, he can vaguely make out how Bucky pauses his frantic attempts to break free of his restraints. His chest is heaving, every breath drawing in more and more of the knockout gas. His body must be metabolizing it quickly, but Sam knows it’s still affecting him, slowing him down.
If Sam could just get free—knock off the mask and distract Asshole for long enough for Bucky to get loose, assuming that his full strength would be enough to snap the cuffs free from the chair—
“Why should I believe you?” demands Asshole.
“Because I wanna be able to fucking walk,” Sam snaps. “Especially since you took my wings.”
He takes a deep breath. His heart is beating so rapidly it’s making him feel lightheaded, and his ears are ringing like someone shot a gun right next to them. His leg—he can’t even think about that, can’t bring himself to look down. Instead, he stares right at Asshole, holding his gaze.
“Come on. Not like I can get very far, not like this.”
For a moment, Asshole hesitates. His gaze flickers between Sam and Bucky; down to the scorched ruins of Sam’s leg; up to the gleaming gold and obsidian of Bucky’s arm.
Sam thinks, just for a second, that he’s going to agree. He’s going to uncuff Sam, and Sam can either deck him or maybe gouge out one of his eyes, then reach over and rip the mask off of Bucky’s face, and then Bucky will just need a little while to process the lingering gas, and then he’ll be at full strength and he’ll be able to break loose and help Sam stop Asshole once and for all—
“No,” Asshole says, shaking his head and backing away. “No, I don’t believe you.”
Sam swallows, throat tight and tasting like bile. Pain pulses like a second heartbeat in his leg.
“It’s the truth. You’ve made your point; you’re gonna get what you want, and I might as well make it easier on all of us.” Sam blinks and meets Asshole’s gaze again, distantly hoping that maybe the tears in his eyes will convey a kinda kicked-puppy sort of thing. “You were right, okay? I should’ve just told you.”
But Asshole is still shaking his head. He’s standing next to Bucky now, who’s resumed rattling the cuffs and twisting his head from side-to-side in an attempt to dislodge the mask, trying to free himself with a heartbreaking desperation.
“Should’ve brought a fuckin’ chainsaw with me,” Asshole says, shoving Bucky back in the chair with one large hand. “Wasn’t thinking. But I can work with this.”
And Sam realizes what he’s going to do a split second before the flame ignites. “No, no no don’t Jesus please—”
Bucky can’t really scream, not with the mask strapped to his face. Opening his mouth wide just means he ends up choking and retching on the gas, and if Sam could stop screaming himself, he’d be telling Bucky just to breathe, inhale as much as he can and maybe that would overwhelm his system and knock him out again. Because that would be better than being awake for this.
The smell of his own burnt flesh was nothing compared to this, to the stench of roasting skin and muscle and nerves as their captor tries to—to burn straight through Bucky’s shoulder, to disconnect the arm through force.
“It won’t melt,” Sam chokes out, knowing that Asshole must already know that; he’s prepared for however long it’ll take to go all the way through the bone. “Vibranium won’t melt; please, fuck, I’ll tell you how to get it off, just stop—”
Nothing he says makes a difference. Asshole keeps his back to Sam, his body blocking him from seeing the damage. But he can see Bucky’s reaction on full display, how he struggles like a pinned butterfly against Asshole’s hand on his chest; the tears streaming down his reddened cheeks; the sickening cycle where he opens his mouth to try and let some of the pain out as a scream, gags on the stream of gas, regains control for a second before starting all over again.
Sam’s own wounds pulse in time with the rapid rush of his heart. He screams as if he could channel Bucky’s voice through him; strains against his cuffs until they dig into his wrists and ankles and split the skin.
His voice catches in his throat, and he breaks off into a coughing fit of his own, spitting and gasping, head spinning at such a dizzying rate that he’d put the likelihood of passing out as “high,” if he was capable of thinking about that right now.
But he doesn’t have time to be so self-reflective. As he blinks the tears from his eyes and heaves in breath after choked-off breath, he notices—something. A flash of light; a shimmer where the air should be still.
Asshole doesn’t notice, not with his back turned. And it probably wouldn’t register even if he was facing that direction.
But it means the world for Sam. Because he knows what a Redwing looks like, even when she’s cloaked in stealth mode.
A moment later, and she flickers into beautiful, beautiful sight, and then her taser connects with the back of Asshole’s neck.
He screams and drops the blowtorch. It hits the cement floor with a horrible clanging noise, but thank Christ for small miracles, it doesn’t explode or anything like that. Asshole goes down himself a second later, twitching, and then Torres and Rhodey burst into the room, and Sam, to his eternal and undying embarrassment, goes from tears passively streaming down his cheeks, to actively sobbing in pain and relief.
“His mask,” he chokes out to Torres as Rhodey slams a knee into Asshole’s back and snaps cuffs around his wrists. “Get the mask off Bucky, now, please—”
Torres strides over to Bucky, once again blocking him from Sam’s view. A second later, Bucky starts coughing—but it’s clear, no longer smothered and choked.
“Holy fuck,” breathes Torres, staring down at Bucky’s arm.
“Let me see,” Sam demands, blinking as quick as he can to clear his vision and straining forward against his cuffs
The movement jostles his injured leg, and he lets out an involuntary hiss. Torres starts and turns around, eyes widening as he takes in Sam’s condition.
“We need medical evac for Captain Wilson and Sergeant Barnes,” he says, speaking into his comms as his fingers rapidly input something into his wrist gauntlet. His Redwing splits apart, one half flying behind Sam, the other behind Bucky. A second later, there’s the soft hissing sound of her lasers cutting through the cuffs.
Sam only half-listens to Torres saying things about fourth or fifth-degree burns, or to Rhodey tersely snapping out the Miranda Rights as he drags Asshole away. Torres is still standing in front of Bucky, whose coughing has faded away into a ragged breathing that’s almost more concerning.
“Torres,” Sam says, as Redwing starts working on the ankle cuffs. “I am so happy to see you. Seriously. I’ll take you out for drinks later, and I won’t even laugh when you keep getting carded. But if you don’t step out of the way and let me see Bucky, I’m gonna have to ask Redwing to take you out.”
Torres glances back at him—at his leg, eyes tracing the length of the burn of his calf, and then he looks back to Bucky and swallows. “Cap…”
“Let me see him,” Bucky rasps out, his voice sounding absolutely wrecked.
Torres hesitates a second longer, and then steps aside just as Redwing works her way through the last cuff.
And maybe Torres was right to block his view, because the second Sam sees Bucky, he’s gripping the arms of the chair and pushing himself up, the need to be close to him overriding any sort of common sense or survival instinct he might have.
His legs disagree with his desire to stand. He sways for a second, managing to balance on his undamaged right leg, before his spinning head, cramping muscles, and seared nerves all conspire to send him crumpling downwards.
Torres had started moving towards him the moment that he stood, and so he’s able to grab on to Sam and sling his arm around his shoulders before he can do even more damage by crashing to the floor with all his weight on his burned knee.
“Whoa—” Torres says, at the same time that Bucky snarls, “Sit down; you’re the one with the fucked-up leg—I’ll come to you—” and then, ignoring the yells of protest from Sam and Torres, starts to stand up himself.
Or tries to. He’s holding his metal arm with his right arm, so he can’t brace himself as he gets up out of the chair. His legs, probably still weak from the knockout gas he spent several hours inhaling, don’t even make it all the way to standing. He falls back into the chair with a pained grunt that turns into a sharp cry when the movement yanks at the carnage around his left arm.
Sam nearly succeeds in pulling away from Torres to get to him; would’ve made it if his leg didn’t buckle the second he put weight on it.
“Both of you, just stay still!” Torres’s arms tighten on his shoulders.
Sam has enough sense to register how rattled the kid looks, and he feels bad, he really does—seeing the both of them so beat up can’t be easy on him.
But he can make it up to Torres later. Bucky needs him now.
Luckily, Torres seems to realize that too. “If I bring Sam over there, do you both promise to just stay put until medvac gets here?”
“Yes,” Sam says. “Just stick me in his lap, Jesus, I promise—”
“Okay, okay.”
Torres, bless him, takes most of Sam’s weight and helps him hobble over to Bucky’s chair.
He looks even worse up close—which is saying something, given how bad he looked at a distance. Sam has seen corpses with more color to their skin than Bucky has right now. He’s sweating and shivering simultaneously; his condition couldn’t be more obvious if he had the words “I AM GOING INTO SHOCK” tattooed across his forehead.
The worst part, of course, is his arm.
Not even his arm, really—his collarbone, the edges of the socket. As Torres carefully seats him on Bucky’s right leg, Sam gets an up-close view of a gorge of bubbled red and blackened flesh running from the top of his clavicle, disappearing somewhere under his armpit. The smell makes bile rise in his throat, and he swallows it down with strength he didn’t know he had left. He thinks he can see a flash of bone at the deepest and widest points of the wound.
Just a bit further to the right, and Asshole would’ve been torching Bucky straight through the neck. And Sam would have been sitting there, feet away, completely helpless to stop him.
Bucky’s good arm wraps around his waist, pulling him close with a grasp far weaker than his usual one. Sam presses his forehead against Bucky’s, closing his eyes. He can’t shut out the smell, or the sound of Bucky’s ragged breathing, but it helps all the same.
“Hey,” Bucky murmurs.
“Hey, yourself.” Sam kisses his cheek.
Bucky squeezes his side. There’s so much they both want to say. There’s so much they don’t have the energy or the emotional fortitude to talk about right now.
“Could you do me a favor and take the arm off?”
Sam pulls back. Up close, it’s easy to read the vulnerability in Bucky’s eyes—and, he knows, it’s equally easy for Bucky to look at him and see the weight of all his guilt, because they both know that this is all his fault; wouldn’t have happened if he’d just told Asshole how to take it in the first place, and—
“Stop it,” Bucky says. “Just—don’t. Don’t, okay? It was my fault for not protecting you in the first place and not seeing that we were going into a trap, and—”
He breaks off. Sam opens his mouth to tell him how absolutely absurd that is, but Bucky groans before he can start speaking.
“Can we do this later? Just—the socket is already compromised. I’d rather get it off now than having it rip out when the medvac guys get me onto a stretcher.”
“We are gonna talk about this later,” Sam replies.
But he doesn’t hesitate when he reaches across Bucky, careful not to touch the raw wound or to move his own injured leg. His fingers are steady as they press out the pattern onto the metal surface, somehow still cool despite the heat he can feel radiating from Bucky’s skin.
When the sequence is complete, Bucky lets out this awful little sound that’s somewhere between a cry, a gag, and a moan. Sam freezes, hand tight around the vibranium bicep. “What—”
“Pull it out,” Bucky hisses, eyes squeezed shut and a fresh row of sweat beating his hairline. “Like ripping off a Band-Aid. I think some of the internal components might’ve melted or gotten shifted or something.”
Sam wants to throw up again, but that wouldn’t help either of them. Instead, he tightens his grip and does what Bucky asked—he pulls.
The arm comes free with the sound of metal-on-metal, and another cry from Bucky. Torres steps in and takes the arm from Sam, which was good because he probably would’ve just let it fall to the ground, too focused on Bucky and on saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, shit—”
“It’s fine,” Bucky gasps, his hands squeezing Sam’s shirt. “It’s—it feels better. Lighter.”
Sam decides to believe him. He rests his hand on Bucky’s uninjured shoulder, fingers brushing against his neck. His pulse is far too fast, though Sam realizes that his own probably isn’t so far off.
“Medvac’s entering the base now,” Torres says. “You two ready to blow this joint?”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Sam replies as Bucky laughs shakily.
Sam lets his forehead rest against Bucky’s again. Bucky leans into him. They’re not okay, but—they will be.
“We made it,” Bucky murmurs, like he’s reading Sam’s thoughts. “And mostly in one piece. That’s not too bad, right?”
Sam laughs, knowing that he’s pressed close enough that Bucky can feel the wetness on his cheeks. He kisses Bucky’s temple. Footsteps from the arriving medical team echo from somewhere not so far away.
“No,” Sam says. “No, that’s not so bad at all.”