Chapter Text
“Sergeant Barnes?”
Bucky held up one hand toward the agent he was speaking to, silently asking for a moment, before he turned toward that quiet call. Agent Coulson was walking up with an uncharacteristically pinched expression.
“We…” Coulson paused with a slight grimace; Bucky knew at that moment that whatever was going on, it wouldn’t be good. “There’s a situation that we require your assistance with.”
And after everything that SHIELD had already uncovered at Obadiah Stane’s illegal fighting "kennel" hadn’t been enough to affect the normally staid and stoic agent, but whatever this was, had… “Not good” was probably going to be the understatement of the millennia.
“Radio down if Steve needs any help wrangling the rest of those weres,” Bucky said to the agent he’d originally been talking to. Then he turned to follow Coulson toward the business offices in the huge kennel building.
Kennel Building. Right. What a nightmare. Sixty-two weres – mostly wolf and tiger, but there had even been a feisty rat, two bears, and oddly one stag – already catalogued, and there were still another couple of buildings to deal with. Some of these weres had been prisoners here for a few years, used as unwilling combatants in Stane’s “animal” fighting rings.
Bucky had killed the bastard too quickly.
But with Stane having such mastery with Overshadow, he hadn’t been able to take the risk of making the younger vampire suffer as much as would have been just. Bucky hadn’t been willing to risk anyone else getting hurt by being Overshadowed into jumping into the fight to allow Stane to escape.
Fucking young upstarts, always thinking that they could get one over on one of the really old ones like himself. He’d been old before he’d helped drive the Boli across the Danube; what did some little two-hundred-year-old pissant think he could do to someone like James? Hell, unlike Stane, Bucky didn’t even have to worry about sunlight or iconography or any of that bullshit any longer. Hadn’t since long before Alexander the Great had dared attempt to seize parts of his homeland.
He'd still killed the bastard too quickly, though.
He stifled a grumble as Coulson led him back into the primary business office for the second time that morning. There was a closet on the back wall that was standing open, with several agents clustered around it. One of them turned to see Coulson and Bucky approaching, and she waved the others back out of the way for the more senior agents to approach. Along the back wall of the closet, stood another door. A hidden door. It was open, and from the dark opening, there came a sudden, overwhelming odor of silver.
“What’s this?” he asked Coulson warily as he paused in the closet’s doorway and stared into the secret passage. All he could see were chains of various thicknesses hanging from the ceiling. Literally hundreds, no, thousands of chains, all with the dull patina of very old silver.
“Hell.”
Bucky blinked and turned to glance at the female agent who had answered him, the one who had motioned everyone out of their way. She was grave, and her complexion was more than a little pale, but she didn’t elaborate. Coulson finally replied:
“She isn’t wrong.”
With that, he pushed past Bucky and began to lead him through the passage, using his hands to brush aside the silver chains that dripped from ceiling to floor.
It was a set of stairs going down into the dark stone of the bedrock, and they seemed to go on forever. Every inch of the passage was filled with those silver chains, so that the weight of them pressing against them from all sides almost felt like a hug – if perhaps it was an angry were-bear with a toothache trying to hug them. He’d seen something like this once in his long life, almost a thousand years ago. In Jerusalem.
Chains of silver-plated metal had filled a similar passage, though not as long, that led to a chamber carved into desert stone, where an ancient order of Jewish holy men that no longer even walked the Earth, had trapped a “dybbuk”. In reality, she’d been a were-fox from some tribe in an unnamed Celtic land far to the north, seized as a slave, and brought far from her home. The abuses she’d suffered had driven her mad, and she’d stopped caring about concealing her nature long enough to murder the bastards who had been trying to sell her. Even if she’d been healthy and whole enough to escape the cage they’d had her shoved into, there was no way she would have survived trying to slither her way through that forest of silver chains in any bid for freedom.
He'd killed those bastards too quickly, too.
This level of… dedication… to the concept, however, was utterly insane, though. There had to be literally millions of dollars worth of silver hanging from the stone here, and he could only just start making out some light through the links in front of him. Not even the strongest full Were Bucky could think of would manage to make it more than a body-length into the passage without burning themselves to death against all this silver. What in all the lowest hells could Stane have concealed down here?
The angry snarl a few moments later gave him the answer. Wolf. The pungent scent only confirmed it. Curiously, though, only one wolf, as far as Bucky could smell.
Breaking out of the swinging tangle of silver chains was a shock when they finally did, and the very first thing he noticed was the smell of rancid meat and blood. So much blood, and layers of it, old, old blood under layers and layers of progressively fresher blood.
Wolf blood.
One wolf’s blood.
It clung to his nose and swam through his head and the rage and hate and terror in that blood made Bucky wince. Every drop of it had been spilled by darkness. It reminded him of the wretched odor of a feral’s den.
The next thing he noticed were all the candles. About half were lit, although the room was also lit by electric lights, some built in to the ceiling, and some being brought in and set up by other agents, it was clear that usually only candle light illuminated this… chamber. They were stuck to sconces on the walls and onto knobs of stone here and there, and to the floor in big puddles of pooled wax. And to some of the… things… in the room.
Hell, indeed.
The walls were filled with implements of pain. Whips, silver wires with sharp barbs, staves and boards and paddles, some with silver spikes, some with copper or brass, some with none. Knives of steel and silver and bronze and glass. Long silver nails and pins. Jagged-toothed saws. In one corner, a forge, with dozens of irons displayed against the wall, each with a different shape or brand sent into the end. Along another wall, a massively thick cross made of stone, with silver shackles at the end of each part, obviously meant to hold wrists and ankles, On the wall beside it, more collars and buckles and straps of leather and iron and silver.
A breeding bench.
Every direction Bucky looked, was another implement of torture, another nightmare. He’d never seen such a glut of sadism in all his long millennia. Even the most extreme “historical displays” that were meant only to part the gullible from their money could not dream of this much depravity. And, unlike those money-traps, every bit of it was obviously well used.
“…what the fuck…”
Sometimes other languages would come to him more easily in the moment, but right then? English had the perfect amount of vulgarity to convey his horror.
It all almost paled next to the Cage, though.
The Cage lay in the center of the room, where it couldn’t be missed – as if anything that big could have been missed anyway – and where the occupant would be surrounded on all sides by the torturous hellscape. Fifteen feet wide and deep, ten feet tall, with bars that were two inches thick, and coated in a thick layer of silver. The floor was stone, just like the rest of the floor, and the walls, and the ceiling, and there was only one door, which was secured by several massive locks. Next to the door was a trough cut into the stone itself, filled with musty water, and beside that, a hollowed-out depression that stank of fetid blood and rancid meat, although it was empty at the moment, without even a spatter of blood to stain the stone.
Within that cage, a single wolf, who was staring at the agents bustling about the room with white-rimmed amber eyes and a lip curled in a silent snarl. The were – he, Bucky saw when he’d spun around once to keep an eye on an agent just outside the bars – was fitted with shackles, a massively thick collar, and a muzzle, with chains that ran to anchors and winches. One chain to each foot shackle, which ran to a winch at each of the four corners of the cage. The chain to the collar ran up through an anchor ring in the ceiling, and from there, to another winch beside the door to the cage. Even the muzzle had a chain that led to an anchor bolt above the door. The wolf had enough chain at all points to only just manage to reach any part of the cage, but even as he twisted about and paced, the silver-plated chains would brush against his fur, burning another patch with a soft -hiss- and a whisp of steam or smoke.
Dark fur, nearly black with what could be hints of deep brown under the dust and burns and shed, was patchy from many such brushes, and in some places, the fur was missing altogether, revealing thick scars on the wolf’s skin. The collar and shackles and muzzle were almost covered with heavy enchantments that seemed to make the air crackle with impatient lightning, and all of them seemed to be tied to and powered by what looked to be a glowing blue gem the size of Bucky’s own fist that seemed to be implanted directly into the center of the wolf’s chest.
“what. The. Fuck.”
The wolf spun back around and snarled, teeth snapping on empty air, white flecks of foam flying from his jaws to spatter against the floor. After a few more snaps, another snarl like the sound of a rusty blade on bone and stone, the wolf paused and crouched, trembling as he stared up at Bucky, who was now standing a few steps from the cage’s door. Bucky waited there, just taking in… everything. The burns and scars, the chains, the white rim all the way around the amber irises, the tuck of the wolf’s tail, the glyphs peeking through patchy fur from that collar. He just took it all in for long, long moments, trying to comprehend… everything.
Making that bastard suffer for a century would have been too quick.
The longer he stood, though, the calmer the wolf got, without Bucky even having to reach out and try to Overshadow or influence himself. Not that he planned on trying to Overshadow the poor wolf; he’d probably had more than enough of that from Stane.
Ears that had been pinned back to his skull slowly began to creep upward, and the whites slipped away from the rims of his eyes. Curiosity began to seep through the fear and rage, and for one moment, Bucky almost thought the wolf was about to tilt his head like a confused pup. He sniffed the air, lip curling once before he sneezed and shook himself to sniff deeply again.
“He’s dead. I killed him. We’re going to free you from this place,” Bucky said softly.
The wolf didn’t relax, but, instead, sniffed deeply again, even more confusion filtering into his expression.
“Buck?” he heard from behind him as Steve stepped from the hidden passage. “What heck is this place?”
Almost reluctantly, the wolf glanced away, toward Steve. He stared for a moment, ears dipping back down and out to the sides again as his eyes narrowed. Shock filtered into his eyes, and he shifted, straining forward just a little, to sniff even harder as Steve sidled up to Bucky’s right side.
All at once, the wolf’s ears jerked upward, alert, shocked. Enraged. His gaze darted back and forth between Bucky and Steve several times, before, in an instant, the wolf exploded with fury and fear, lunging forward against the chains, slamming into the bars, biting futilely within the muzzle and snarling with hatred. Heedless of the way the silver chains slapped against his limbs and body, the way the silver bars sizzled and burned against his skin, the wolf flung himself against the cage over and over and over again, as if he would rip them to the tiniest shreds if he could only reach them. Gone was the cautious curiosity, replaced now by the coldest, fiercest hate Bucky had ever seen.
“Stop!” he begged, even going so far as to try and reach through the bars with his metal hand to try and keep the wolf from battering himself against the silver bars. All that earned him was a grunt as the wolf then tried to use his muzzle to slam Bucky’s hand against the cage door. “Stop it! You’re hurting yourself!”
But it was no use. The maddened creature would not calm down, and it seemed as if he would batter himself to death, if need be to reach them.
“Shit! I’m sorry,” Bucky hissed mournfully. He hadn’t wanted to… But he had no choice. Not if there was any chance left at all to save whoever this poor thing had been, once.
“…I’m so sorry…”
He reached out with his mind, sliding into the frenzied madness of the wolf’s mind with the ease of a fish in a stream. The will he found there was surprisingly strong, but not strong enough to resist when he pressed just so…
With a terrified yelp, the wolf suddenly collapsed, eyes rolling up into the back of his head as Bucky Overshadowed him into a deep, heavy sleep.
“This?” Bucky finally answered Steve, voice thick with regret and sorrow. “This is Hell.”