Chapter Text
I see James' hand tremble, even though he's doing everything he can to make it stop.
He sits on the edge of the examination platform, his posture stiff, his single arm tense at his side. He doesn't flinch. Hell, he barely even moves. But I can spot the way his jaw is clenched too tight, the way his eyes dart toward the overhead sensors with a familiarity I wish he didn’t have. Every inch of his body reads restraint, bracing, anticipation.
He thinks he's about to be hurt.
I want to scream that he isn't, that he will never be again, but I know better. He won't believe words.
I walk over slowly, careful not to startle him, and step up to the platform so we're at eye level. He finally looks at me. His gaze is sharp, alert, but there's something softer and more fragile too, hidden behind the steel.
"We're going to look at your arm," I say gently, keeping my voice low and even, like I would with a child after a nightmare. "Only look. No cutting, no pain, no restraints. Just imaging. I'll be right here, the whole time."
His breath catches, not enough to draw attention, but enough for me to feel it in my chest.
I reach up and touch the side of his face, brushing my fingers just beneath his hairline. His skin is warm, and the familiar feel of his stubble beneath my palm is grounding in a way I didn't expect. My other hand finds his shoulder, the somewhat healthy one, and I steady him as much as I steady myself.
He leans into the touch without thinking, and the movement nearly breaks me.
Because I don't know the full extent of the damage. Because what if it's worse than what I can fix? Because what if there's more to this than the scans can show, more pain lodged somewhere deep in the nerve pathways that no machine can quantify?
I press my lips together and try to hold steady, but I feel the tremor building under my skin. My hand is still on his cheek, the gesture meant to soothe him, to steady him — but it’s cold, visibly unsteady. And he notices.
Of course he notices.
Before I can even force my body to calm, he lifts his only hand, and places it over mine gently. A gesture so small and careful, I almost miss it, but I feel it like a jolt to the center of my chest.
It’s nothing, but it’s everything.
That simple, quiet touch grounds me in a way I didn’t know I needed. It doesn’t erase the fear or undo the damage, but it steadies the worst of the spiral. Enough to let me breathe.
He’s terrified, I can feel it in the way his palm lingers — hesitant, unsure. But still, he noticed me. Still, he chose to reach for me. Even now, with everything he’s suffered, he still wants to comfort me.
And that is precisely why I will do everything in my power to help him.
"The calibration complete," The Princess says, stepping away from the console. "Ready whenever you are."
I exhale, the breath sharp in my lungs, and turn toward James. Our eyes meet, and in that fraction of a second, so much is exchanged — his nerves, my determination, the unspoken promise that whatever we’re about to see, we face it together. I give a quiet nod, and he returns the gesture with the barest incline of his chin, subtle but deliberate.
"Okay," I murmur, keeping my voice as steady as I can. "Lie back for me."
He obeys without hesitation, easing onto the exam table, though I can see the tension in the set of his jaw and the way his body stiffens against the unfamiliar surface. I move to his side and glance up at the Princess. "Let’s see what we’ve got."
The interface blooms to life with a low hum, the lights casting a soft glow across the lab as the image of James’ body appears in full. The scan rotates slowly, illuminating layer after layer of muscle, bone, and nerve.
Immediately, my eyes scan the projection, absorbing every jagged edge and compromised segment.
"Multiple fractures in the ribs," I say aloud, mostly for the Princess’s benefit. "Old ones, some that were never properly set. Bone density loss around the left femur — probably a stress response from favoring the right leg over time. His spine... there's compression in the thoracic vertebrae. Some healed, some still inflamed. That’s from repeated impact, possibly restraint trauma."
The Princess stands beside me, watching the display with quiet attentiveness. "You mean from being tied down?"
I nod slowly. "Or from being slammed into things repeatedly. Both. And here... damage to the ulnar and median nerves in his remaining arm — likely from overcompensation. He’s been using it too much, relying on it entirely. That kind of strain doesn’t just heal."
James doesn’t move, but I feel his eyes on me.
"How bad is it?" the Princess asks, her voice low.
"Bad," I admit, my tone tight. "But manageable. This kind of damage is extensive, but it’s... layered. Nothing here is beyond correction."
She frowns slightly. "And the shoulder?"
I swallow, steadying my breath, and then instruct the system to zoom in. "Magnify the left shoulder."
The scan adjusts, shifting focus to the ruined socket where the metal arm used to be. I brace myself — but it’s still worse than I imagined.
"Jesus," I mutter, the word escaping before I can stop it.
The entire area is a chaotic mess of shredded muscle fibers, ruptured tendons, and exposed bone.
"The arm was already compromised when he pushed it past capacity," I begin. "But then it tore off — violently. You can see it here. The dislocation isn’t clean. It’s... brutal. Fragments of the socket are embedded into surrounding tissue. There’s metal shrapnel still lodged inside. The neural links I reconnected back then — they’re mostly gone now."
The Princess is quiet, letting the horror of it settle.
"It’s not just trauma," I add. "This is repeated degradation. Years of overuse. Abuse. They treated him like a machine and just... expected the parts to keep working."
Silence falls over the lab. It’s heavy. James still hasn’t moved an inch.
But even as I stand there, staring at the destruction, a small ember of resolve lights in my chest. Because despite all of this — despite the damage, the pain, the sheer violence that carved through his body — I think I can fix it. I have to fix it.
I blink, and the truth settles in.
"It’s severe," I say, more to myself than anyone else. "But not permanent — at least not all of it. We can rebuild this. We have to."
My voice barely registers in my own ears. I’m still staring at the scan, still cataloguing every rupture, every collapsed nerve bundle, every stretch of tissue hanging on by the thinnest of threads. My thoughts move too fast, calculations running alongside possibilities, but even so — I know I can fix this. It’ll take time, more time than anyone will be comfortable with. And it will hurt. But it's not impossible.
I almost let myself breathe before I see a glimpse on the hologram.
At the corner of the scan, tucked into the halo of readings meant to stay in peripheral view, is the flicker of brain activity — subdued, unstable, disrupted in ways that have nothing to do with sleep or fatigue. I hesitate for only a second before I raise my voice, steadier than I expect.
"Show me neural activity," I tell the interface. "Zoom in on the cerebrum — full range."
The screen shifts instantly, the image sharpens, and my stomach drops.
I step forward slowly, almost against my will, and stare. The scan is crisp and complex, layers of neural maps and vascular routes, circuits and colors dancing in a quiet, lethal rhythm. But it doesn’t take long. Within moments, I see what I should never have to see.
The damage isn’t scattered. It isn’t incidental. It’s surgical.
I swallow hard. My mouth is suddenly dry.
The prefrontal cortex — blistered with abnormalities that should never form naturally. The hippocampus — scarred in a way that looks almost scorched. The amygdala — compressed by what looks like residual swelling, likely from repeated trauma. But it’s the deeper structures, the ones they clearly went after deliberately, that make the blood drain from my face.
There are patterns here — patterns I’ve never seen in a human brain. Not from injury. Not from disease. This was altered, like a circuit board rewired by someone who never cared if it sparked or exploded.
I take another breath, trying to steady the tremor starting in my chest. Because I’ve seen trauma before. I’ve seen soldiers with blast damage, accident victims with crushed skulls, patients after induced comas. But this? This is something else entirely. This is what happens when someone tries to own a mind.
"I’m no expert..." The Princess says quietly, "but that doesn’t look normal."
I don’t answer right away. I can’t. Because I simply don’t have words.
I’ve spent years training, specializing in the precise dance of the nervous system, and I have never, not once in my career, looked at a scan and failed to form an immediate diagnosis.
Until now.
"It’s..." I pause. My voice is thinner than it should be. "It’s like someone took a scalpel to his wiring. Or a hammer. Possibly both."
I lean in, eyes moving across the highlighted zones, and I spot it — evidence of electroconvulsive damage. Small, repeated burns. Asymmetrical responses. Disrupted pathways.
"They shocked him," I whisper. "Again and again. Not to fix anything. Just to—"
I stop myself. My throat tightens.
Just to break him.
I force my body to remain still, but my mind has already begun to spiral. My training is screaming at me, clawing for control, demanding answers. But nothing about this makes sense — not even in the worst-case scenarios I’ve imagined. I can’t see where the mind ends and the programming begins. I don’t know what’s real anymore inside this scan.
I bite down on the inside of my cheek, trying to anchor myself in the moment, because James is still on the table. Still here, still trusting me. And he doesn’t need to see me unravel.
I force the breath down my throat, let it scald my lungs, and drag myself back to the shoulder scan. Back to what I can fix. I start listing procedures out loud, rapidly and without pause — nerve grafts, structural realignment, synthetic fiber integration, vascular rerouting if there’s still inflammation. The words tumble from my mouth like I’ve uncorked a dam, trying to bury the memory of what I just saw in his brain under cold, clean science.
"We’ll need a complete reroute from the brachial plexus down," I murmur, staring at the web of shattered nerve pathways. "And a new anchoring method. I can’t use standard titanium fixations — not with the trauma in the surrounding tissue. We’ll have to go softer, something that doesn’t cause more inflammation. If the remaining fibers are still conductive, we might even preserve some sensation—"
The Princess’s hand touches my arm. I turn, startled, and the look on her face almost undoes me.
There’s no pity in her eyes — only a quiet, steady worry, and it pierces deeper than any kind of sympathy ever could. She doesn’t say anything at first, and I wish she wouldn’t look at me like that. I can’t bear it. Not when my throat is already tight, not when my pulse is pounding in my ears.
"We will solve this," she says quietly, just for me. "No matter what."
I want to believe her. I need to believe her. But all I can feel is the sickness in my stomach and the unbearable weight in my chest. Because no matter how steady my hands are, no matter how many surgeries I’ve performed, I was never trained to look into the body of someone broken by the very legacy I come from.
It was them. My mother. My father. Her research. His ambition. Their goddamn war machines. And now James is here, barely holding together, and I’m the one who has to clean up their sins.
"We’ll start as soon as possible," I whisper, my voice hoarse.
I take a breath that barely steadies me, forcing the tremble out of my spine and willing my heartbeat to fall back into something I can control. My hands still shake at my sides, but I fold them as I cross the room. James is still seated on the exam table, his shoulders tense, his gaze already waiting for mine like he’s been counting the seconds I was gone. I offer him the softest expression I can manage, and rest my hand briefly on his arm.
“I need to speak to the Princess alone for a moment,” I say, keeping my voice as gentle as I can. He doesn’t answer right away, but his brows pinch, just enough to show he doesn’t want me out of his sight. “Just a moment,” I promise, letting my fingers linger. “I’ll be right back.”
He stills. His jaw tightens slightly, his eyes flick to the Princess and then back to me, wary. Unwilling. It takes everything in me not to reach for him again, to anchor him like he anchors me. Then, after what feels like a small eternity, he gives a single nod.
The Princess makes a subtle gesture, and the soldiers step forward. They don’t speak, just offer James the space to move at his own pace. He casts one last look at me before he follows, and I hold it until he’s gone.
I turn slowly toward the Princess. She’s waiting, patient but alert, like she’s known from the start I’d have more to say. And I do.
"The damage is extensive," I begin, voice low but tense. "His shoulder is beyond anything I’ve seen outside of a warzone. Reconstructing that arm will require more than just surgical time — it’s going to need structural reinforcement, nerve reconstruction, tendon realignment, and trauma mapping. It’s not something we can do in a few hours under light anesthesia. We’d need him fully under for this. Days, maybe more."
The Princess listens, but she doesn’t interrupt.
"And the brain..." I hesitate, the words catching in my throat. "I’m not qualified to touch it. Not this. This isn’t just neurological damage from injury — it’s repetitive. Electroshock, chemical suppressants, some kind of neural fragmentation I can’t even begin to map. It’s as if they shattered him on purpose. I’ve never— "
I stop. Breathe.
"I’ve never looked at something I couldn’t immediately start to solve."
She nods slowly, but her gaze sharpens. Something clicks behind her eyes. She doesn’t speak yet, but I can see her mind spinning, pulling threads together.
"How is he alive?" I ask, the question heavier than I intended. "How did he survive this long with that kind of damage — especially to the brain?"
She folds her arms. "Cryo. They froze him between missions. Slowed down the decay, kept the pathways from degrading too quickly. It wasn’t preservation — it was like a pause."
My eyes widen. That’s why there’s no consistent healing. That’s why some parts look ancient and others are fresh.
"But... It does sound like a good option to your problem," the Princess says quietly, as if she’s still testing the thought in her own mind. "It would allow him to heal, rest, and be operated on in segments without the strain of waking or pain."
I turn toward her slowly, unsure I even heard her right. "Cryo? You mean put him under again?"
"Not like before," she says quickly. "This would be different. Not full stasis. Something safer — a modified pod that maintains low neural activity and body function, but allows access for procedures. Sections of the pod would open, only when needed."
The very idea makes something in me rebel. The thought of him sealed away, cold and alone, again — it’s unbearable. I don’t realize I’ve taken a step back until I feel the edge of the console behind me.
"Is it safe?" I ask, too fast. "I mean — fully safe. No risks of cellular degradation, no memory loss, no—"
"I wouldn't suggest it otherwise," she says, meeting my eyes. "The tech will be custom built. Stabilizers, real-time neural monitoring, pulse sync. I would never let harm come to him."
My pulse pounds. I glance again at the image on the screen — the wreckage that once was his mind, and the silent agony written into every scan line. Weeks. It would take weeks. And we don’t even know what we might find once we go in.
But if this gives him even a chance — a real chance to wake without pain, to have a body that doesn't betray him—
I exhale. "Then we do it."
She nods once, already calculating. "I need a few days to put it all together. And the arm — he will need one. I've been working on a prototype. I can finalize the design now that I’ve seen the scans."
Relief hits me in a strange wave. "Thank you."
The Princess offers a small smile, then grows serious again. "Until then, I can give him the purple serum for the pain. It won’t heal, but it will ease the worst of it."
I nod. "Yes. Please. Anything to ease it."
She hesitates, her voice softening. "And Professor... You should spend time with him. These operations — especially what we’re looking at in the brain — this is going to take time."
The words hit harder than I expect. They don't surprise me — on some level, I already knew. But hearing them spoken aloud, with such gentle certainty, makes it real.
Weeks.
Weeks without James. Without his presence beside me like an anchor. Without the quiet strength of his gaze, the weight of his silences, the way he grounds me when everything else starts to spiral. I think about waking up and not seeing him across the room, or hearing the shuffle of his movements, or feeling that single moment of warmth when our eyes meet and the world steadies.
My chest tightens. My throat burns. I can already feel the ache of missing him, but I square my shoulders immediately.
I can’t afford this grief now. I can’t afford to fall apart over what I will lose when the point of all of this is to give him something back.
So I inhale, steady and deep, and force the pain back down. Lock it away with all the other things I don’t have the luxury of feeling right now.
"Thank you, Princess," I say. "For everything."
She just nods kindly.
I turn and walk out of the lab, my pace quickening with every step. I don’t even realize I’m running until I hit the corridor and my shoes begin to skid against the polished floor.
I need to get back to him. I need to see him, before the quiet comes.
The sun slips lower, bleeding amber and rose across the skyline, casting long shadows over the Wakandan hills. The window stretches from floor to ceiling, wrapping the world in soft light, and I sit in front of it, legs folded beneath me, my back against the cool stone wall. The warmth of evening pools at my feet. The silence in the room is complete.
James is asleep on my lap.
His head rests on my thigh, turned slightly toward the window, lips parted just enough to let his breath escape in the slow, even rhythm of deep sleep. His one hand is curled loosely against the floor, and he’s still as a statue. Finally still. And I sit motionless, one hand in his hair, stroking gently through the strands, careful not to disturb the quiet he’s earned.
His face is beautiful. Even now, even after everything — the swelling, the bruises that line his cheekbones like shadows, the faint cut near his temple, already beginning to scar. His lashes are thick and low against his skin, his brow smooth in a way I rarely see when he’s awake. When he sleeps like this, there is no violence on his face, just peace. Temporary, fragile, exquisite peace.
I guard it like it is my sole purpose on Earth. My fingers move slowly through his hair, brushing away the stray strands that fall against his forehead, and I let my eyes trace the slope of his nose, the curve of his jaw, the arc of every line I have memorized too well. I hold him like this is all I was made for.
But inside, I am fire.
I cannot stop thinking of the scans — the obliterated nerve clusters, the torn socket, the neurological destruction that no natural force could explain. The way they shocked him, sliced into him, pulled him apart and rewired the ruins like he was nothing more than a machine.
And it was my parents who did this. All in the name of progress.
My breath catches. I close my eyes for a moment, just long enough to keep the anger from leaking out through my hands. He doesn’t deserve to carry even a flicker of it.
I look back out the window. The sunset is beautiful, but I can’t feel its warmth. I see Yulia in every streak of red, every gilded edge of light. Her eyes. Her laugh. The way she used to stand beside me with stubborn pride and impossible hope.
I see her fall again, over and over.
I should’ve protected her. I should’ve known. I should’ve been enough. I was supposed to be the strong one, the eldest, the one who kept the monsters away. But I was too late, too blind, too buried in my own shame to see what she needed.
She died because I didn’t stop them in time.
I lower my eyes, trying to will the grief back into submission, and my gaze falls to the bracelet at my wrist — the Wakandan beads the Princess gave me. Sleek, dark, humming faintly with vibranium’s quiet song. I trace a finger over them, absentminded, chasing a rhythm to distract myself from the ache pressing into my ribs, from the weight in my chest that no amount of silence can lighten.
As I turn the bracelet, I realize one of the beads glows.
It’s faint at first, a pulse just under the skin, soft and blue and utterly incongruent with the fading gold around us. The light pulses again, more insistently now, as if responding to some unspoken call. I blink, uncertain, wondering if exhaustion is playing tricks on me, but the glow doesn’t fade. It appears to be waiting.
Hesitantly, I press it, and the window before me shifts. Light dances across the glass in waves, and then the entire surface blooms into a projection — smooth, precise, unobtrusively brilliant. The room doesn’t brighten, but it changes. The air feels charged, colors settle, lines sharpen.
I look at the single image in front of me and my heart sinks into the floor beneath me.
James.
Not the man broken in my lap, but the boy before all of it. The man he was.
He stands tall in his military uniform, face clean and open, full of something I don’t recognize at first because it’s been missing for so long — ease. His posture relaxed, a smile tugging at his mouth. There’s mischief in his eyes, the kind that probably got him in trouble and charmed his way out of it. Youth clings to him, full of promise, freedom and possibility.
And it crushes me.
The air rushes out of my lungs as I stare at him — at the person he used to be. My fingers hover just above the light of the image, instinctively wanting to touch him, to gather him close, but there’s nothing to hold. Only light. Only memory.
Next to the image, in the Princess’ careful, deliberate script, a single note appears:
This is everything I could find. I thought you should have it.
I blink hard against the sting in my eyes, then, heart thudding, I press the bead again.
The projection expands. Lines of data spill outward in crisp clarity, reorganizing into structured files, chronologies, records. A full archive built with care, curated in silence.
"James Buchanan Barnes," I whisper, barely exhaling. The syllables feel foreign and sacred at once. My hand rests lightly on his hair as he sleeps, steady, unknowing.
Born: March 10, 1917.
Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York.
Education: Public School 625, Brooklyn Technical High.
Enlistment: 107th Infantry Regiment.
Rank: Sergeant.
Images flicker past — photos of him in training, with fellow soldiers, in motion. There’s one of him leaning on a railing, laughing at something just out of frame. Another of him appears to be with Captain America, both impossibly young, caught mid-conversation on a street corner, faces lit by laughter and the thrill of something hopeful.
Then the words turn ice-cold.
Presumed KIA: 1945.
Location: Austrian Alps.
Soviet retrieval: Confirmed.
Codename: Asset.
Subjected to Winter Soldier Initiative. Neural wipes commenced.
I flinch.
Medical scans appear, overlaid with unreadable codes, Cyrillic notes translated just enough to understand the shape of the horror. Augmentation reports, physiological charts, neurological overlays mapping the systematic fragmentation of a human mind.
The word "Asset" appears again and again. They erased him, rewrote him, rebuilt him into something that could be pointed and fired. They gutted his past and stitched him into myth — a ghost with a trigger. I’ve seen the evidence in his body. I felt it in every tremor under my fingers.
And then another image fills the screen.
Two scientists, captured in grainy resolution, mid-conversation in what looks like a testing chamber. One of them I immediately recognize as my mother — her eyes bright, her face open and focused, sleeves rolled, gesturing toward a console. She looks passionate. Fulfilled. She looks like she believes she’s building something good.
My stomach tightens.
She’s younger than I’ve ever seen her. Before the lines settled in her face, before guilt, before she understood what they were building.
Beside her—
I freeze.
There’s a tall, sharply dressed man, the angle of his body turned slightly toward her. His eyes are cold, his mouth a line. Something in his bearing screams control, ownership, power. His expression is unreadable, but some sick recognition in me reacts before my mind does.
I know this man. I’ve never seen him before, and yet I know.
This is my father.
Revulsion floods my throat.
He stands too close to her. His hand rests on her shoulder like it belongs there, and she lets it. She’s smiling. She looks like she trusts him, like she doesn’t see the predator at her side. He looks at her like he’s already claimed her brilliance, already repurposed it, and somehow, in that moment, I understand everything. I understand the shadow she lived under, the guilt she tried to bury, and the truth she couldn’t undo.
He built this. He made her into a weapon, too. He took her love of science and twisted it into something cruel. He built the empire that tore James apart and buried Yulia in the ground.
And I am his legacy.
I can barely breathe. Rage claws up the back of my throat, so I grip James tighter, grounding myself in the feel of him, the weight of his head on my thigh, the steady rise and fall of his breath.
I stare at the man in the image, and I make my vow right there.
I will dismantle everything he touched. I will burn his records, erase his patents, hunt down every last lab and ruin them with my own hands. I will not carry this name forward. I will not be the child of monsters without making war against them.
Because James deserves his life back.
Because Yulia deserves to be mourned with justice.
Because I cannot look at what they made and pretend I don’t see my own reflection in the glass.
I close the projection with a touch. The light fades, and the window returns to glass. The world is dark beyond it now, the sun fully gone. James stirs in my lap, but doesn’t wake. My fingers return to his hair.
I breathe once. Then again. And I swear to him, to the dark, to whatever is listening—
“I’m going to fix this,” I say, voice trembling but resolute. “I don’t care how long it takes, or what I have to become to do it. I’ll fix this, James. I swear it.”