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“He’s inside,” says the woman in the white coat when Rumlow enters the little observation room next to the cell. “Sedated about an hour ago, but he’s awake.”
Rumlow nods without looking at her. The tiny observation room is all concrete blankness, and the woman, like the rest of the techs that work around here, doesn’t look any more interesting than her surroundings. But the room also contains a little monitor, set up above the desk the woman is sitting in front of and streaming a black-and-white video feed of the cell, and that’s got all the interesting stuff he needs right now.
He steps closer to the screen. He can’t see as many details as he would have liked; the figure on the screen is sitting further away from the cameras than he'd expected, his features and clothing little more than a monochrome blur.
“That really him?” he asks. “I mean, is it—”
“Close enough,” the woman says. There’s a folder open on the desk, next to a half-empty cup of coffee and a keyboard and some old security reports: the page on top looks like a standard form for monitoring the asset’s vitals, except that next to today’s date at the top right of the page, someone has scrawled + 3 DAYS MAX RECOMMENDED POST WIPE in bright red ink.
The writing looks angry.
“He didn’t know his name, last time someone went in to check,” the woman continues as Rumlow runs his eyes over the page. “My guess is he isn’t alert enough to put any pieces together yet. But he’s getting there.”
Rumlow follows her gaze back to the screen. The blurred figure in the cell is unmoving. If this woman is right, if this is really something that Rumlow is going to be able to do, then it is almost too good to be true.
“Amazing,” he says. “You’d think his brain’d be soup by now.”
“It heals. The healing starts as soon as it’s damaged.” She shrugs, like she is trying to hide the fact that she seems genuinely impressed with this particular ability. “Give it another week or two, he’ll remember exactly who he is. Who knows, maybe he’ll even get back memories of all the stuff he’s been doing for us.” She shrugs again. “Then again, maybe his system is so accustomed to the regular wipes that he’ll go into shock and drop dead. Not something we want to find out.”
“Hm,” he says: he’d stopped listening toward the end there. The thought of waiting for the soldier to be able to remember everything is—wow. That would be amazing.
No way they’ll let Rumlow keep him out of cryo for that long, though. The fact that he has been allowed this visit is already a special favor.
He glances around the room—no one around apart from them, of course—before he lowers his voice and says: “Did you put him in the clothes?”
The white-coat’s tone switches from one of faint awe to something more like contempt. “Yes. We did.”
“Good,” he mumbles. His eyes are back on the screen. “We’ll need some privacy. No cameras.”
“Do you really need to—” She cuts herself off, biting back the last words and taking a breath before she starts speaking again. “Do you know the monetary cost of keeping the asset out of cryo like this beyond his post-mission wipe? Medication, surveillance, medical personnel, the extra guard duty. Electricity costs for the—”
“I’m aware.” Rumlow doesn’t bother to list the personal favors he is owed that have led to this visit being approved. All the extra work he has done, the shit he has put up with. This woman must know already that people far more powerful than either of them have decided that Rumlow is allowed to do this, and that there is nothing she can do about it. She’s just trying to get him to feel guilty, hoping that it'll cause him to back off. And Rumlow didn’t get this far in life by ever backing off.
His silence works, apparently: after only a second the woman keys in the code that makes the monitor above the desk snap to black. He wants to smile at how quick it all is: she obviously has this particular combination of keys committed to memory. Visits like this aren’t as unusual as she's making out, apparently.
“Don’t interrupt us unless I’m dying in there,” he says. Then he squares his shoulders and takes a deep breath.
“Pervert,” she mumbles under her breath as he turns towards the door that leads to the cell.
He pretends not to hear. When he is promoted, and one day he will he promoted, he will personally intervene to get her transferred to Siberia.
There's a tiny glass window set into the inner door that leads to the cell, and through it he can see that the concrete space inside is clean and bare. A low cot in one corner, just a thin mattress on it covered by a gray blanket. The cot looks almost normal, except for the two thick metal eye-hooks bolted on the wall above it for attaching restraints. He knows that they usually don’t bother with those anymore—the soldier simply doesn’t struggle, except during particularly unpleasant procedures—but today is different. There are cuffs on each of the man’s wrists: thick, ugly metal things that would seem laughably excessive on a normal human. Both cuffs are attached to the hooks on the wall with two lengths of something that looks like a more flexible version of the steel rope you see supporting suspension bridges—again, excessive-looking if you didn’t know who you were dealing with.
Today, these restraints have enough slack in them for the man sitting on the bed to be able to wrap his arms around his knees, which is exactly what he is doing.
Rumlow smiles to himself, and hits the button for the retinal scan next to the inner door. He lets it scan him, and waits a beat while the door slides open. At the sound, the man on the bed’s head jerks up; he lets go of his legs and drops his knees down into a normal sitting position. An automatic reaction: he’s embarrassed about being seen looking scared.
And that? That is something the soldier would never do. The soldier had no need to protect its own pride like that; he simply did not have any.
The lab worker outside had been right: this is no longer the Winter Soldier. The man in front of him is the product of a brain that is desperately trying to heal itself in the same way as a twitching bug tries to crawl away from the boy who’s torturing it. This is James Buchanan Barnes.
What’s left of him, anyway.
Rumlow steps forward; the door behind him clicks closed, and then there's several loud clunking noises as it deploys its automatic locking system. The room smells faintly of bleach and sweat and of whatever cleaning solution they had used on the soldier. It’s quiet. Rumlow can hear his own boots creak as he moves across the small space toward the man sitting on the cot.
Barnes’ legs are trying to twitch back up in front of his chest again, but he is repressing the movement, as well as making a stoic effort to keep the utter confusion off his face. Clearly, he doesn’t currently remember who Rumlow is—he’d be much calmer if he did, because Rumlow is always very nice to the soldier. Nicer than some other people, anyway.
Rumlow crosses the small cell toward the cot, and Barnes continues his almost-imperceptible attempts to control his posture and expression. Every part of him must be fucking dripping with terror—hell, Rumlow would be scared too, if he’d woken up confused and brain-damaged in a place like this—and yet Barnes is still making an attempt at bravado, at saving face. It’s almost charmingly pathetic, because of course Barnes has no idea that there are cameras on him, no idea that he was being recorded long before Rumlow entered the room, no idea that every scrap of human privacy has been ripped from him decades ago.
The woman hadn’t been lying about the clothes, either: Barnes has been dressed up in an olive-colored woolen shirt and pants, along with brown boots and a cotton belt. The outfit probably wouldn’t satisfy the pedantry of a WWII reenactor, and nobody has bothered to cut the man’s hair into anything resembling a regulation hairstyle, but it'll do. The clothes are really just there so that Barnes won’t recognize how different his situation is from the way it’s supposed to be. Not yet, anyway.
That’s what the black gloves on Barnes' hands are for, as well. The gloves are important. It’s good that Barnes has not tried to pull them off.
Rumlow resists the urge to grin, sits himself down next to Barnes’ right side, close to where the other man is sitting but not close enough to touch. Part of him is hoping that he’ll get a smart comment from the kid to match that fake-brave posture, a quip or an insult or something, but Barnes just watches him with that same desperately-not-scared look, his face a carefully maintained mask.
So brave. Really fucking touchingly beautiful. Rumlow could get right into it, he supposes, but he is a good guy, and so he decides to take his time.
He is amazed how much fake gentleness he is able to shove into his voice. “Do you know where you are?”
The restraints clink softly as Barnes’ head turns toward him half an inch, enough for Rumlow to catch the flicker of surprise on the other man’s face. Whatever else is going on in that grey mush inside Barnes’ head, he has obviously at least managed to piece together that he is in captivity again, and that the man in front of him is an enemy. The gentleness must have caught him off guard.
Rumlow moves a little closer, under the guise of setting his weight into the thin mattress. Barnes’ eyes are fixed again on the other side of the room, toward the wall that has the drain underneath it and the hidden video camera at the top, but the room is quiet enough to pick up the disturbance in the other man’s breathing as he notices Rumlow getting closer. Every part of him must be dying to stare at his new visitor, to try to work out why Rumlow is here and what he wants, but Barnes is still faking indifference.
So fucking brave. This guy is a fucking American hero. Rumlow bites his lip to hold back a smile, and moves closer again, just a little. He repeats the question, still gentle but with more firmness behind it. “Do you know where you are.”
Barnes turns to Rumlow, looks directly at him, and spits in his face.
“Ask your mother,” he says.
Rumlow pulls back, brings up his hands to cover his face. Not with disgust—he has handled far worse in the way of bodily fluids from the man in front of him, unfortunately—but because he doesn’t want the other man to see him smiling.
This is better than he expected.
See, he’d figured that if the scientists were right about the supersoldier brain-healing bullshit, and Barnes’ old personality did come back, then that personality would turn out to be close to the personality of his friend Captain America—all wimpy kindness and passionate speeches and dumb, infuriating stoicism.
This, though? Rumlow knows, from a long career of dealing with people for whom he represented a really, really bad day, that the kind of aggressive reaction Barnes had just provided him with almost always comes from being scared. From being uncertain, not just about their current situation but about life in general.
Captain America would not spit like that. Captain America would not need to. Barnes needs to. And Rumlow is going to stick his fingers into that fear and that uncertainty and rip it wide open.
Still turned away from the other man, Rumlow wipes the spit off his face, cleans his hand off in turn by rubbing it on a patch of blanket next to him, where it leaves a darker smear. It’s an impressive amount; Barnes must have been saving it up in his mouth since Rumlow walked in the door. He respects that.
Finally, he turns back to face him again. Let Barnes think that he had been composing himself. Let him think that he’s still got some hope here. Rumlow speaks again, and this time turns the gentle concern in his voice up to ten, like he’s talking to a scared toddler. “Do you remember your name?”
Barnes doesn’t look at him, but there is another flicker on his face: he hadn’t been expecting Rumlow’s gentle tone to stick around. He blinks, and there is something almost like hope blooming under the confusion and the fake bravado there, despite how hard Barnes is trying to hide it. It’s not hope that he is free and okay, obviously—even with his brain still so fucked up, Barnes clearly knows that he is in too deep of a pile of shit to be able to expect that—but hope that this new visitor might actually be someone kind. A doctor, maybe; someone who can help him in some way. Maybe that is why this time, Barnes actually seems to take in Rumlow’s words. He doesn’t answer, but it is obvious from the way that he looks off into the middle distance and narrows his eyes that he is trying. He is trying to remember.
Not that it does him any good. The name is clearly gone. The Russians must have been particularly harsh when they took out that particular memory.
“You don’t remember?” Rumlow follows up, still gentle like he's handling a kitten.
Barnes must be really falling for his bullshit now, because he looks at Rumlow, and actually answers. Sort of, anyway: he shakes his head. His face is pale. There's sweat on his forehead.
Rumlow smiles.
“That’s okay. It’s okay if you don’t remember,” he says, and lays on more of the sweetness. “Do you remember the last thing that happened?”
Barnes has already turned away to stare across the room again, frowning, squinting like he is trying to see something that’s too far off in the distance. “I hit my head,” he says. “My head… I don’t…”
“It’s okay,” Rumlow says again, and without thinking about it, reaches out to touch the other man’s face.
Barnes doesn’t flinch, surprisingly. Maybe there is still some muscle memory from the soldier there, because the soldier no longer flinches from him, and hasn't in a long time. Maybe he's just desperate. Whatever the reason, Barnes stays unmoving as Rumlow slowly slides the tips of his fingers over his temple, stroking. He is close enough to Barnes now that he can smell him: fresh sweat and that cleaning solution again, but under that, something different, something warm and appealing.
The wool shirt, that’s it: it still has a faint musty smell to it, as if someone had pulled it out of storage. It should be a bad smell, but it isn’t: it reminds Rumlow of the winter clothes from his childhood. His childhood sucked, yes, but being warm was always good. He leans in a little closer to breath it in. Barnes’ hair is clean and looks softer than usual, and Rumlow runs his fingertips up over it now, pushes a strand back behind one ear. Leans in to breathe in the smell of his hair as well.
It’s probably a mistake to bring attention to Barnes' hair like this, since it must be way longer than Barnes last remembers it being, but the man doesn’t react: he lets Rumlow stroke the side of his head and trace his fingers along his ear, as gentle as with a child. Lets Rumlow wipe at the tiny drops of moisture that are collecting on his forehead. Lets him run his fingers back and forth across the soft, hidden skin at the base of his skull.
After a minute Barnes turns to look at him again, confused and wary but so close to trusting already, and it’s so good.
Rumlow says, quietly: “Do you want me to tell you what's going on?”
Barnes gives a nod so tiny it’s almost imperceptible. His face is still pale, and his lower lip trembles just slightly. All that bravado has melted away like snow, just from a bit of petting. It’s kind of sad, actually. Rumlow has to shift a little to ease the new tension forming in his pants.
He cups his hand over the side of the man’s head, still stroking his hair gently with his thumb, and tightens his grip just enough so that Barnes cannot easily pull away. The other man doesn’t seem to notice the change: he simply stares at Rumlow, his waiting face still full of the same half-hidden confusion.
Rumlow feels one side of his mouth raise up into another smile, and he speaks.
“You’re Hydra's prisoner,” he says, looking directly into Barnes’ blue eyes. “We won. You have been working with us for a long time now, and everybody you ever knew is dead.”
He pauses, still looking into the other man’s eyes. What happens now, he figures, depends on how much of Barnes really has returned. Maybe the shock will undo all of the supposed healing in his brain. Maybe he’ll just shut down and go back to being the other guy.
But that doesn’t happen. Instead, Barnes’ expression turns hard and cold. He stares at Rumlow with a look in his eyes like he wants to rip him apart. But alongside that new hate is something Rumlow hadn’t expected: disbelief.
Not shocked disbelief, not trying to take in what has happened disbelief. No, Barnes actually doesn’t believe him. The hate in his eyes is because he thinks Rumlow is being an asshole; he thinks that Rumlow had acted with pretend kindness only to try his hardest to upset him. There is not yet a part of Barnes that believes that his situation could actually be real.
And that? Fuck. He has to shift his weight again. He's already so hard it hurts.
And it's really not that surprising, when he thinks about it. For one, it would be natural for a captor in Rumlow’s position to say untrue things in order to fuck with him. They’d probably done the same thing to Barnes the last time they caught him. Also, what normal person would believe it when they heard something like this? What has happened to Barnes since the last time he remembered anything is so fucking terrible that it never would have occurred to him before, not even in his darkest nightmares. The poor bastard doesn’t have the imagination to begin to accept his new reality.
Rumlow shifts even closer to the other man, slides his free hand across his own crotch in a quick gesture he hopes Barnes won’t notice: they have so much more to do before he gets to that. Barnes flinches at how close he is now, but he is clearly trying to deny Rumlow the satisfaction of actually pulling away. He’s still just staring at him, disgusted, probably wondering how the hell this man can think up such sick fantasies.
“We won,” Rumlow says again. “Soon Hydra will take over the whole world, and we could not have done it without the help you gave us. Your family is dead. Your friends are dead. In fact, you killed some of them yourself.”
All he gets is the same look of disbelieving disgust.
It’s clear that words alone are not going to penetrate. Maybe if Rumlow had the opportunity to leave him alone in the cell for a while, his disbelief might start to waver. Maybe Barnes might second-guess himself and start panicking once he’d had a few days to mull everything over. But he doesn’t have that kind of time.
It’s okay, though. Rumlow has something far, far better than words.
He leans in toward him, smiling, and the other man shudders a little and looks away as Rumlow takes hold of his woolen shirt.
When he undoes the top button Barnes looks down, startled, but then he turns his head away, like he can pretend this isn’t happening if he just stares at a wall intently enough.
There’s no undershirt, like there would be if Barnes really was in uniform, but Barnes doesn’t seem to notice: he just keeps his head turned away to his left, gaze focused stubbornly away from him as Rumlow gets the rest of the shirt undone. That behavior suits Rumlow just fine, because it means that Barnes sees nothing even as he opens the shirt entirely and pushes it down off his shoulders, revealing the spread of his bare chest. He can’t get the shirt all the way off with those cuffs still on his wrists, but he can get it down so that both sleeves are caught near Barnes’ elbows, and that’s enough.
“Hey,” he says, voice gentle again. Barnes ignores him.
“Hey,” Rumlow says again, and this time he takes the other man’s jaw firmly in his hand, turns his head toward him.
Barnes meets his eyes and just stares right into him, anger and confusion and such defiance in there. It’s all about to be destroyed, and Rumlow doesn't think he can get any harder.
“Look down,” Rumlow whispers, and when Barnes eyes don’t move, he just maneuvers Barnes' head to force his view down and to the left.
Barnes screams.
It’s so loud and sudden that it actually hurts Rumlow’s ears, the type of scream that leaves a person’s throat torn up. Barnes wrenches out of his grasp, almost knocking Rumlow backwards off the bed as he throws himself violently to the right. He seems to be trying to get himself away from the metal arm, but of course it’s attached and follows him, so instead Barnes grabs it with his right hand and starts violently trying to yank it off his shoulder.
Rumlow laughs and laughs and laughs. This bit isn’t erotic, and he hadn't expected it to be. It’s just hilarious.
The screaming has turned into panicked shrieks that echo in the concrete room. Everything Barnes had been covering up and faking and rationalizing, every shred of bravery—it has all vanished. There’s nothing left now except pure mind-shredding panic.
And it’s only after about thirty seconds of this that the sounds change again, get more urgent and desperate: despite the panic, and despite the sorry state of the man’s brain, an actual rational thought must have found its way in there—the faint idea that if this is happening, then just maybe the other stuff Rumlow had said is also true. Rumlow can tell the exact moment when the animal fear starts mixing with a purely human kind of terror.
He reaches out and grabs Barnes' human wrist. This is fun and all, but he’s starting to get impatient. “Hey,” he says.
Barnes doesn’t listen. He is braced with his back against the wall now, and has given up trying to wrench his arm off; he is instead digging his fingers into the seam where the edge of the metal meets his skin, as if he can remove the limb that way. There’s already blood on his fingers. Rumlow has seen the soldier do the same thing before, when he was half-awake and dazed and just out of cryo, but watching this guy do it while he’s lucid is something else.
Still. They've got other things to do. “Hey,” Rumlow says again, “Hey, buddy.”
Finally, Barnes looks up. He is still gasping, face red and dripping with sweat and half-covered with hair that's fallen forward and his eyes looking like he is in hell, but—he sees Rumlow now, at least, and Rumlow takes advantage of the lapse in the raw panic to grab his jaw again and look into his eyes.
“It’s true,” he says to the man panting miserably in front of him. “It’s all true, and you know it.”
“Fuck you,” Barnes says again, but there’s nothing behind it now. The phrase comes out more of a sob than anything else.
“It’s true,” Rumlow says again.
The formless terror in his eyes is focusing into actual horrified realization. Barnes' right hand drops away from his shoulder, leaving a smear of red along one bare pectoral. His hands clench into fists, but it doesn’t seem to be anger. He is still panting, softly. His lower lip is trembling again. It’s all, finally, sinking in, but just when Rumlow thinks he’s about to start with the screaming again Barnes suddenly stills, and furrows his brow like he has just thought of something else.
Rumlow's impatience disappears. If Barnes is thinking about what Rumlow suspects that he's thinking about, then Rumlow definitely has time for this part.
Barnes' mouth opens, slightly, then stops. His eyes are wide with a new, terrible curiosity, and Rumlow already knows what the question is. This miserable bastard still doesn’t remember his own name, but he remembers another one.
He wants to ask about him.
“Ask me,” Rumlow says, still close, still not letting go. He is close enough to feel the puffs of breath from the other man’s breathing. “Ask me if he is alive.”
Barnes wants to. Rumlow can tell that he wants to, wants it so much.
But he doesn’t say a word. He clamps his jaw shut like it’s the only way he can stop the question coming out, leans back against the wall behind him, and is silent.
Rumlow raises his eyebrows. Even now, with Barnes' whole world coming down around him, with blood under his fingernails from trying to pull plates of titanium out of his own body, Barnes will still not reveal a specific weakness to the enemy.
That’s why they chose you back in the day, he thinks. You were among the best of them. Not quite the best, but hey, runner-up was good enough for Hydra.
He doesn’t say any of that out loud, obviously. He just strokes the side of Barnes’ damp face. The man’s whole jaw is trembling now, his teeth audibly grinding together, his mouth held in an expression that tries and almost succeeds at being a sneer.
“You don’t need to ask if you don’t want to,” Rumlow says encouragingly. “I’ll tell you anyway. Steve Rogers is dead.”
Barnes blinks, and nothing happens except that something in his eyes closes off, like a door has just been slammed. The tension in his jaw vanishes, like it’s not important anymore, and his flesh shoulder slumps just a little. He looks blank, suddenly, almost as blank as the soldier.
When Rumlow changes his position, pushing himself up so he is kneeling on the mattress right next to Barnes, the other man doesn’t move. He doesn’t even flinch.
Rumlow moves his hand to wrap lightly around the other man’s throat, just taking the last of that personal space. Barnes’ pulse is working hard under his fingers, his skin hot and flushed. He still doesn’t move. Rumlow resettles his weight on the mattress from one knee to the other, taking advantage of the friction provided by the fabric of his pants one last time, before finally reaching down with his free hand and starting to unbuckle his belt.
Amazingly, there is still a little holdout part of the other man that manages to be shocked. Rumlow picks up the tiniest disturbance on Barnes’ face as Rumlow gets his own fly and belt undone and the other man realizes what is happening, what is going to happen, and Christ, if there’s one thing better than destroying a person’s sexual mores, it’s destroying the sexual mores of a guy from the 1940s. Barnes’ neck moves under his grip, like he's shuddering, as Rumlow pulls himself out. His back is still pressed against the wall behind the bed, and this new position puts Rumlow’s crotch at about shoulder height. This way, he can angle his newly-freed dick so it’s right next to Barnes’ face. Barnes can’t get away without pulling away from him and moving, and he clearly doesn’t have it in him to do that.
“Don’t suppose you feel like spitting on me again?” Rumlow asks him.
No response. The flush of anger from before has faded from Barnes' face; he has turned pale again.
Rumlow shrugs. “All right, then,” he says, and he spits on his own hand and wraps it around his dick.
Ideally it’d have been great to make Barnes suck him off, but no way does Rumlow trust those teeth right now—Barnes is not trained and trustworthy like the soldier is. Plus, doing it this way gives him a better view of the expression on the other man's face. Rumlow keeps Barnes’ head tilted up a little with the hand that's still on his neck, and keeps jerking himself off with the other, and Barnes... doesn’t resist. After that initial shudder, he has gone entirely still: the horror of being used like this must be nothing compared to all the other stuff eating away at the inside of his head. He is silent, and the only movement visible apart from the back-and-forth motion of Rumlow’s hand is a few drops of blood still seeping out of the gouges he’d made in his shoulder.
Rumlow keeps going with his left hand, the soft, steady slapping noises his hand makes loud in the silent room. After a minute or two he starts to move his other hand over Barnes’ throat, stroking his Adam’s apple, the edge of his jaw, his cheek—the skin there is always surprisingly soft, under the stubble—and it’s about that time that the first tears start coming.
Fucking hell. Rumlow actually groans out loud.
Barnes isn’t like, sobbing or anything—Rumlow is not that fortunate. No, it's just silent tears that start and then don’t stop, running down Barnes' cheeks, dripping off the edge of his jaw. Rumlow wipes at them once or twice, before finally shifting his hand back to Barnes’ throat.
He speeds up his pace, feels the pressure building already: he isn’t going to last as long as he'd wanted, but on the other hand, it’s not like he’s trying to impress anyone. Barnes’ face is pale and wet and the look in his eyes has dimmed like he is shutting down and dying, and—okay, it’s happening. Rumlow tightens the hand on Barnes' throat and then shoves him back, quickly and suddenly, into the wall behind him. The back of Barnes’ head hits the concrete with a crack, and the sound hits Rumlow all the way down to where his toes curl up inside his boots. Rumlow jerks his hips forward, wrenches his orgasm out onto the man’s face.
Barnes barely seems to notice.
He is still finishing himself off, pumping out the last few drops—they don’t reach Barnes’ face, and fall onto his bare human shoulder instead—and then Rumlow lowers himself back onto his haunches, so that he's closer to the same level as the other man.
“Fuck.” He says it out loud, and it echoes in the cell’s new silence. “Fuck, that was amazing. You are amazing, kid.”
Barnes still hasn’t moved. The tears have stopped, but he doesn’t seem to have noticed the mess on his face. There's some on his mouth, and another droplet of it has caught in his eyelashes.
“Fuck,” Rumlow says again, and takes a minute to try to get his breath back.
By the time he can breathe normally again, the man next to him seems to finally be coming back to life. Just a little bit, at least. His brow is furrowed, and he is staring across at the wall opposite them. That confused expression looks kind of funny combined with the jizz all over his face, although Rumlow is too spent right now to actually start laughing.
Barnes looks at him, then back at the far wall where he’d been staring, and then frowns some more. Rumlow leans forward just a little bit in anticipation to catch the look on his face when he really wakes up.
But the other man just frowns at him some more. “I fell,” he says slowly, like he’s trying very hard to piece the words together. “I hit my head when I fell…”
He trails off and looks at Rumlow again, completely lost.
Rumlow exhales. Well, it was good while it lasted.
Rumlow breathes in again, lets out one last deep, satisfied sigh, and starts to do up his pants. Barnes just stares at him. There’s still something in there, maybe, some tiny piece of horrible recognition deep down, but most of it’s just gone: it’s the same look of faraway confusion that Rumlow has seen many, many times before when the soldier has just woken up, or when he is trying to think about something too deeply. Maybe the information was too much for Barnes to accept, or maybe his brain’s just too fucked after all these years to hold itself together for too long.
Whichever it is, Rumlow’s had his fun.
“You fell,” he agrees as he fastens his belt. “You hit your head. Don’t worry about it.”
Barnes nods, frowning. His face really is a mess, tears and snot and come everywhere. Rumlow could just leave it there: the woman outside already thought he was a pervert regardless, and they're probably going to just hose him off right away anyway.
But Rumlow is a good guy, and he and the soldier go way back, after all. He leans in closer—Barnes, once again, doesn’t flinch—and picks up one corner of Barnes’ unbuttoned woolen shirt, uses it to wipe off his face, gently.
He fixes the shirt so it’s resting back over Barnes' shoulders again, and then, impulsively, gives him a kiss on the cheek. His skin tastes salty.
Rumlow pulls back, straightens Barnes' shirt again, then stands up to admire his work. Barnes looks almost normal again now. You can tell by the smell in the room what had happened, but whatever.
Barnes’ gaze follows Rumlow as he stands up. The dumb confusion on his face is deepening.
Rumlow stretches out a bit—god, that was relaxing—and goes to turn towards the door so he can let himself out. He catches a glimpse of the man’s face as he turns, though, and he could swear that the expression he sees is one of... loneliness. Barnes clearly doesn’t understand why Rumlow is leaving, why he is about to be here alone, again.
Rumlow relents, pauses, turns back toward the man on the bed. Man, he is always way too nice to the soldier.
“You were brave,” he says, and he reaches out and ruffles the kid’s hair. Most of it is clean, although there are a few drops that Rumlow had missed still stuck to the strands right at the front. “Don’t worry about anything. This’ll be over soon. Just wait right here, and very soon someone will come in and help you.”
Barnes nods dumbly.
Rumlow smiles at him and pats his cheek, and then goes to let himself out so that the others can come in and start to get him ready for the chair.