Chapter Text
Bucky
─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ───
Seventeen days.
He's counted every one of them. Every meal through the slot. Every time the lights dim and he can't sleep. Seventeen days since they dragged Steve out of that transport truck and took him somewhere Bucky can't follow, can't see, can't reach.
The room is exactly as they left it.
That's the part that undoes him. The bed is made, he made it on day two, couldn't look at it rumpled anymore, the dresser still holds the books Strauss allowed him, spines out, neat. The counter has food he hasn't finished. And in the corner, just past the foot of the bed, the rug sits exactly where it always has.
Empty.
Bucky doesn't look at it directly. He hasn't since day one. But he's always aware of it the way you're aware of a bruise, peripheral, constant, impossible to ignore.
He's sitting on the floor with his back against the bed when Steve starts screaming.
He goes still.
It comes through the walls in waves, muffled by concrete, by distance, by whatever insulation this place was built with, but still there. Still Steve. Bucky knows his voice in every register it has ever existed in. Knows it soft and sleep-rough in the mornings. Knows it low and certain giving orders. Knows it breaking open the way it is now, raw and ragged, and absolutely unmistakable.
He presses his metal hand flat against the floor.
He started doing it in the first week. Some idea that he could feel vibration through the arm, through the building, pick up some signal that told him Steve was still breathing. He was right. He wishes he'd never tried.
The screaming goes on.
Bucky sits with it the way he's learned to, jaw tight, eyes fixed on nothing, every muscle in his body pulled toward a door he can't open. He used to throw himself at it. Metal fist first, until the door held and something in him didn't. Used to scream back, like Steve could hear him through all that stone. He stopped on day four when he realized the rage was the only release valve they were allowing him. So he stopped giving it to them.
Now he just sits. And listens. And counts.
On day five they delivered a blanket.
Thick wool, dark navy. Left it inside the door without a word, and Bucky stood there staring at it until Strauss followed an hour behind. He didn't say much. Just observed, in the same tone he used to discuss training schedules, that they found sessions more productive when the asset wasn't shivering. That the cold made it erratic.
Counterproductive.
He used the word erratic like Steve was a machine running poorly.
Bucky picked the blanket up after Strauss left. Folded it. Set it at the foot of the bed.
He hasn't unfolded it since.
On day nine it was pajamas. Flannel, dark gray, the kind that actually hold heat. Bucky didn't wait for Strauss that time, just took them, folded them on top of the blanket, and sat back down on the floor. Strauss came anyway. Mentioned, without particular emphasis, that the asset had been kept without adequate covering during certain procedures. That warmth was a useful incentive. That Bucky would find it easier to manage the asset's behavior if its basic needs were being met.
Its.
The screaming pauses. Bucky's head lifts.
A long silence.
He counts. Gets to thirty-eight before Steve's voice comes back, lower now, rougher, the sound of someone running out of something. Bucky's eyes close. He knows this part too. Knows what comes after the low sounds. Knows the particular quality of the silence on the other side of it.
He keeps his hand flat on the floor. Keeps counting heartbeats he can't actually hear.
The door opens.
Strauss doesn't knock. Bucky watches his boots cross the room without lifting his head, the deliberate, unhurried pace of a man who has never needed to announce himself anywhere.
He's carrying something.
Bucky looks up.
It's small. Fits in one hand. Gray, soft-looking, stitched together from cheap felt, a wolf. Small ears, button eyes, the approximate size and shape of something a child might sleep with.
Bucky stares at it.
Strauss sets it on the dresser with the same care he gives everything, precise, deliberate, nothing wasted. Then he turns and looks at Bucky with that expression he wears like a uniform. Composed. Patient. Faintly interested.
"Kravinoff was thorough in his debrief," Strauss says.
Bucky goes very still.
"The attachment was notable." Strauss glances at the stuffed animal, then back. "The small one, particularly. He said the asset was... inconsolable. When it was lost." A pause. "Animals serve a regulatory function for certain temperaments. We find it useful to account for that."
He says it like he's describing a training aid. Like he reached into the worst moment of the last month of their lives and pulled something out of it and put it on Bucky's dresser as a management tool.
Bucky's metal hand curls against the floor. He breathes through his nose.
"For when it returns," Strauss says. Not a question. A schedule.
He moves toward the door.
From somewhere deep in the facility Steve screams again, sudden, sharp, the kind that punches through walls like they're nothing, and Bucky's whole body flinches before he can stop it. Just once. Just enough.
Strauss pauses at the door. Doesn't turn around.
"When you're ready to be what it needs," he says, "you'll have it back."
The lock engages.
Bucky sits in the quiet of the room. The blanket at the foot of the bed. The pajamas folded on top of it. The stuffed wolf on the dresser with its button eyes staring at nothing.
Steve's voice has gone low again. That horrible, running-out-of-something low.
Bucky pulls his knees up. Presses his metal hand back to the floor.
Counts.