Work Text
You’d think that after years and years of hunting down the last remnants of HYDRA, Bucky would eventually be done with this cancerous organization. But no. Just like the Red Room, HYDRA was a behemoth of an institution and it was true what they said. Cutting off one head only ever seemed to create three new ones.
So it didn’t matter that the World had practically ended three times over. No blip, no war against a purple titan, no multiversal catastrophes could ever put a real end to the past that still haunted Bucky.
It had honestly gotten old a very long time ago. But Bucky wasn’t the sort that laid down and gave up, and he didn’t like unfinished business. Sure, a part of him had considered turning his back on the matter. He had played with the idea of giving up on HYDRA and letting someone else deal with them hundreds of times. After all, his programming was gone, he’d been free of their grasp for years now. He should’ve been done. But Bucky also knew that he’d never truly wash his hands off them, especially not if he knew that there were still remnants of the once so-powerful organization operating.
It didn’t even matter that they had fallen so far from their former glory. The present version of HYDRA was a far cry from their glorious times. Nowadays, there wasn’t one big HYDRA, the heads had disconnected. Now they were dealing with a bunch of little fringe groups that still tried to desperately claw their way back to power. They might’ve gotten weaker and less daunting, but Bucky was careful to not underestimate them. If you ignored a small infection it could still fester into something deadly.
Bucky simply couldn’t let that stand. So he was still hunting them, even after all these years.
In the beginning, it had helped as a distraction, after his pardon, recovery, and his clearance to work in the field. He still hadn’t found his footing in the 21st Century and with Steve gone, Bucky didn’t really know what to do with himself and his newfound future. Killing Nazis seemed to be as good of a distraction as anything else. It kept him from spiraling into a hole of:
What am I supposed to do with the rest of my life? Who am I supposed to be? How am I supposed to go on without him? Why did he leave-
Bucky welcomed any respite from that mess of treacherous thoughts. So he killed Nazis, first by himself, then with Sam in his new role as Captain America and recently he had acquired a whole team. He wondered what Steve would think of his new colleagues. They certainly couldn’t be compared to the Avengers.
No
.
The thunderbolts, that’s what their team was called, were nothing like Earth’s mightiest heroes. They were more like Earth’s most traumatized assassins.
Yelena Belova, Alexei Andreovitch Shostakov, and Antonia Dreykov shared a similar hatred for HYDRA as Bucky. After all, the Red Room and Hydra had always been closely related. They each shared more than a few experiences with their respective former masters. Ava Starr was similar in that way, too. She’d been burned by some twisted remnant of SHIELD and there had been a time when SHIELD and HYDRA had been one and the same.
John Walker was the only real outlier in Bucky’s eyes. The former disgraced Captain America wanna-be was just desperate to regain some sense of control over his life. At least that’s what it looked like to Bucky. He wouldn’t lie, he couldn’t stand John. But then again, Bucky hadn’t selected the team members. No, that had been the work of Valentina Allegra de Fontaine. If Bucky had been the one calling the shots he probably wouldn’t have chosen any of them, including himself. But after the discovery that Valentina had planned to fuck over all of them and their subsequent fight against the Sentry, they found that they worked quite well as a team. Bucky figured, why not channel that energy into something good, one dead Nazi at a time.
That’s how Bucky ended up raiding a wannabe HYDRA base in New Jersey of all places. As if Jersey wasn’t shitty enough already. The place couldn’t be called much of a base anyway. It was just an abandoned warehouse, transformed into some haphazard labs and weapon arsenals, cobbled together by some clueless megalomaniacs with ideas of grandeur.
Bucky hadn’t expected to find much there. They’d only taken note of the place because there had been some unnatural energy surges coming from it. The kind that used to happen when HYDRA put Bucky in the Chair. They’d staked out the place for a week, watching the comings and goings of about a dozen different men, some in tactical gear, others in lab coats. It didn’t seem to be a large-scale operation and that lulled Bucky into a false sense of security. He underestimated them, something he promised himself to never do.
A stupid mistake.
They were nowhere as organized as HYDRA used to be in their heyday, but Bucky hadn’t expected what they found there either. He was prepared to find weapons, surveillance, and maybe some alien technology. He’d been prepared to fight half-trained militia types. That was mostly what he got, too. They tore through the facility easily, almost too easily, taking out footsoldiers and lab-coats alike.
Bucky didn’t care much for keeping anyone alive for intel. Their research hadn’t indicated any connection to any other remaining HYDRA branches and they could get whatever intel they needed from their data, once they had cut down the members. So they killed indiscriminately, shooting first and asking no questions. Once their enemy's blood was spilled, staining the floor and the walls, they got to collecting. Data, weapons, technology. They split up and that’s when Bucky found it.
The room. The Chair. The source of the power surges.
His heart skipped a beat and then another. Bucky couldn’t be sure if it was beating anymore. Maybe the mere sight of that godforsaken chair was enough to choke the life out of him, even after all these years. He didn’t know how long he stood there, just staring at the chair,
frozen
. It must’ve been a while because he didn’t notice Yelena sneaking up on him. To be fair, Bucky didn’t think that she snuck up on him on purpose. That was just her regular gate. It still startled him when he heard her quiet voice speaking up next to him, yanking him out of whatever frozen state he’d been in. “That must be the infamous chair, right?”, she asked, her tone unreadable.
She always reminded him of Natasha in moments like these, their masks were so similar. It made sense, they were sisters after all, if not in blood then in upbringing, in programming. Bucky didn’t like to dwell on these thoughts, though. Just like he didn’t like to dwell on
him.
Those two were their own thought spirals that Bucky couldn’t afford to fall into.
He needed a split second to compose himself, take a breath, blink, breathe, breathe,
don’t forget to breathe
. Bucky reminded himself over and over again that it was just a chair, that it couldn’t hurt him, not anymore. No one was grabbing him and strapping him down. No one was going to set his mind ablaze and scrape out everything that made him a person.
Despite knowing all this, he had to force himself to approach and examine it. “Yeah that’s the one.”, he nodded, making sure to keep his voice steady. “Or at least a version of it.”
“You think it is the cause of the surges?”, Yelena asked as she approached the contraption too. She reached for the headpiece and Bucky tried to suppress the memories of those cold metal plates, pressing against his skull before burning his memories away.
“Could be, but that would mean that it’s in use-”, he replied as his eyes wandered over to the metal cuffs at the sides of the chair. That's when he noticed the rust-colored stains on the metal. He reached for them instinctively and as his fingers brushed over the blood stain that was still damp, he felt all words in his throat die.
Fresh blood
, so fresh that it hadn’t even fully dried yet. The chair had been used recently.
Extremely
recently.
As if on cue he heard Yelena’s voice cut through the noise inside Bucky’s brain again. “Look”, she called out. When Bucky’s eyes shot over towards her, he found her fingers coming away from the headpiece stained with blood and there was also hair sticking to it. “They used this.”, Yelena said what Bucky already knew.
“Just now.”, Buck nodded.
“So there must be-”, Yelena started to say.
“-an Asset.” Bucky finished the sentence. That was new. That was
different
. Bucky hadn’t encountered any of HYDRA’s experiments in years. So far they’d never managed to get enough of a foothold to start experimenting on humans again.
“Do you think it was one of the ones we took out?”, Yelena asked and Buck suppressed a flinch at her choice of words. He didn’t fault her for it. They’d both been conditioned to think of themselves as objects. They both still slipped up sometimes.
“I don’t know. Possibly, but none of them seemed- “, Bucky started to say but he didn’t really know where that sentence was supposed to go.
“Strong enough.”, Yelena finished for him and she wasn’t wrong. The people they’d fought had been monsters, but they’d still all been undeniably human. They hadn’t been
enhanced
. A normal human wouldn’t be able to survive the chair.
“If we didn’t kill it- didn’t kill them-”, Yelena quickly corrected herself. “They might still be here somewhere.”, she then pointed out.
“Let’s tell the others and do another sweep.”, Bucky agreed. Yelena gave him a short nod before filling in the others over their comms.
In the end, they didn’t have to search very far or wide. Bucky was the one to find it, in a little chamber next to the room with the chair. The second contraption that was perfect to send him into a tailspin. A cryo-chamber.
Bucky didn’t need to open it, to know that it was occupied. The glass was still clear, barely frosted over. They’d stuffed him in there not that long ago. Bucky was faced with the frozen, motionless face of a young man, more of a boy really. Pale, meager, with sharp cheekbones protruding underneath almost translucent skin. His head was shaved and offered a great view of the burn marks all across his scalp, left by the chair. His eyes were closed but they looked almost bruised, with how deep and pronounced his dark circles were.
“I found him!”, Bucky yelled out before reporting his location to the rest of the team through his comms. He didn’t take his eyes off of the boy once, though. That’s why he caught it immediately when the boy’s eyes shot open and zeroed in on Bucky immediately.
Bucky wouldn’t lie. It startled him. It shouldn’t have been possible. He’d been in cryo chambers often enough to know the process. They didn’t freeze gradually, it wasn’t slow. These machines were built to put a person on ice instantaneously. And from a single glance at the control panel, Bucky knew that the boy had a body temperature below 86 degrees. There was no way that he could still be conscious in that state.
Against all reason, the boy was staring at him. He didn’t make any other moves, not a single twitch, he just stared at Bucky without even blinking. Bucky tried to read something in those big brown eyes. Fear, pain, anger,
anything
. But they were empty, entirely
void
. “Hey… Can you hear me in there?”, he asked after the initial shock had passed. The rational part of Bucky’s brain still tried to reason with him. He tried to convince himself that the open eyes were just a reflex, that it couldn’t be possible that the boy was actually conscious.
Then he blinked.
Twice
. It was slow and lethargic, but still there, and the boy’s focus never wavered.
“Holy shit- Is he awake in there?”, Yelena then exclaimed as she rushed up to Bucky’s side.
“Looks like it, even though he shouldn’t be able to be…”, Bucky mumbled before shifting his attention towards the control panel. “Let’s get him out.”, he said before disabling the temp control of the chamber and unlocking it. Yelena took a step back, pulling her gun just in case the stranger defied all laws of science and managed to jump right out and attack them.
Bucky understood the precaution and a part of him blamed himself for not thinking that far ahead. After all, this was a HYDRA asset that had recently been wiped. There was a good possibility that if he was capable of movement, he’d go right for their throats. Bucky had just been too preoccupied with the urge to get him out,
immediately
. So he waited for Yelena to get into position before opening up the door.
A cold blast of air shot out of the chamber and everything was still for a second. Then Bucky realized that the HYDRA agents must’ve stuffed the boy into the chamber in a hurry because he wasn’t restrained in any way and promptly started to tumble forward. Bucky’s instincts set it, just in time to catch the boy before he crashed to the floor face first.
The first thing Bucky noticed about the boy was that he was
light
. Way too light. That wasn’t shocking, he was extremely thin and severely emaciated. The second thing he noticed made that discovery only stranger. Despite being mostly skin and bones, the boy was still muscular. That was only more apparent because of his complete lack of body fat. Someone so starved shouldn’t be able to still retain this much muscle. The third thing he noticed was a complete lack of scars aside from the fresh wounds on his scalp, wrist, and ankles.
“Do you think he’s drugged or something?”, Yelena asked as Bucky tried to turn the boy’s body around as carefully as possible, to lower him to the ground on his back. His body was completely limp, dead weight in Bucky’s arms. When he flipped him around, Bucky still found the boy tracking him with his eyes.
“I don’t know, maybe something paralytic..”, Bucky replied, kneeling down beside him and cradling his head in his hands. Bucky’s mind was going a mile a minute as he tried to think through all the possibilities. If he was actually conscious, the boy should’ve been able to move, even if it was minuscule. He should’ve been shaking at least.
Then again, he shouldn’t have been conscious in the first place, especially since his skin was just as cold as Bucky had expected it to be.
He had to be unconscious.
But if he wasn’t, and he still couldn’t move, drugs could be an explanation.
For some reason, Bucky didn’t believe that through. Mainly because he knew from experience that there was no reason to drug a subject after being wiped. Getting your brain fried made you malleable enough, already.
“Hey, pall… Can you give me a sign that you understand me? Maybe just blink twice for yes?”, Bucky then asked the boy. He didn’t know why his immediate instinct was to be as gentle as he could manage. Maybe because he knew how it felt to be in the boy’s place, maybe because the asset was
just a boy
. Holding him in his arms only made that fact more obvious to Bucky. He couldn’t be older than twenty. He still looked like a teenager. There was no question in Bucky’s mind that he was another victim of HYDRA’s twisted machinations.
The boy stared up at him as he’d been doing this whole time and for a moment nothing happened. Bucky was about to go back to his previous theory that the boy wasn’t conscious at all. Then he did, he blinked twice, slowly, but it was still obvious that he did it with intention.
“Alright”, Bucky nodded, still in awe that this was possible. “Can you move? Blink once for no, twice for yes.”, Bucky went on. He mostly knew the answer based on the boy’s complete lack of movement but he still wanted to ask, to check on the boy’s mental faculties. The boy seemed to hesitate for a moment and as he diverted his eyes for the first time, looking down at his own motionless body. When he looked back up at Bucky he blinked once.
“Is that usual?”, Bucky asked next. Another single blink.
No
. “Did they drug you?”, Bucky continued to ask, trying to find an explanation for the boy’s current state. Another single blink, followed by two quick ones. Then the boy’s eyes shot around the room frantically for a second, like he was trying to find something or… to remember something. And then, another single blink.
This time the boy didn’t look empty anymore, though. Instead, his eyes carried a profound confusion. He actually looked alarmed. “It’s okay if you can’t remember.”, Bucky rushed to explain. They wouldn’t get very far with this kind of questioning and Bucky was aware of that. But he also didn’t know how to fix this at the moment. They had to figure out what was up with this kid, and why he was conscious but paralyzed.
“Yelena? We need the-”, Bucky started to say, looking up from the boy for the first time, only to find Yelena no longer standing behind him, but seated in front of a computer next to the cryo chamber instead.
“We need his file, I know. On it.”, she waved him off.
“Good. Let me know what you find.”, he nodded, returning his attention to the boy. This time when he met his eyes, he found more than just confusion in his big brown eyes. He found
panic
.
“Hey… It’s all good… you’re okay…”, Bucky tried to be as gentle as possible. It didn’t come naturally to him, not anymore. He felt like he had forgotten how to be gentle. “Do you know where you are?”, he asked the boy next, trying to keep him as engaged as possible. One blink. No.
“Do you know what happened to you?” Another no.
The next question was a big one and Bucky already dreaded the answer, because he could guess what it would be. “Do you know who you are?” The boy hesitated again and Bucky could watch the fear in his eyes melt away and transform into something worse.
Devastation
. And finally, one more single blink. No.
God fucking damn it.
“That’s okay… We’ll figure out what’s going on with you…”, he tried to reassure the boy before glancing up at Yelena. “You found anything, yet?”, he asked her.
“
Боже мой
, give me a minute!, she snapped at him and Bucky bit back a reply. Soon they were joined by the rest of the team and Bucky quickly filled them in on their discovery while still trying to keep the boy as calm as possible. He wasn’t doing a great job of it, though. The boy’s eyes kept shooting around the room frantically whenever someone else spoke up.
“God… He looks like he’s still half a child-”, John hissed.
“Why don’t we grab him and move? Why stay here?”, Alexei complained.
“We could scan the files back at our base.” Antonia pointed out.
“But we don’t know if it’s safe to move him. For all we know his spine could be fucked up and that’s why he can’t move. Jostling him too much could kill him!”, Ava argued.
Bucky was getting real sick of all their squabbling and he was about to cut them off when Yelena got ahead of him. “Everybody shut up!”, she snapped, getting them all to fall silent immediately.
“Have you found something?”, Bucky asked, cutting through the silence.
“I think so.”, she nodded, focusing her attention on Bucky for a moment before looking back at the screen. “I found a file, the description fits him. ‘
Subject is 19 years old, 5’6, brown hair, brown eyes
.’ They use the code name
Spider
for him.”
Bucky watched Yelena scroll through several pages of the digital file as he tried to process that the boy in front of him was barely even an adult. It didn’t surprise him, but having his theory proven right still felt like a punch to the gut.
“Try to look for any mentions of ‘paralization’ in the file, can you screen for that?”, Ava suggested, stepping next to Yelena’s side.
“Good call.”, Yelena nodded, typing some more. “Ah… It says here… Subject is a genetic mutate… He’s got… spider-genes-”, she then explained, pulling a face while sounding mildly disgusted.
“What does that have to do with him being paralyzed?! “, Bucky asked, his tone sharper than intended. His patience was running thin as he watched the boy’s eyes stare up at the ceiling and glaze over with more and more panic.
“I’m getting to it!”, Yelena bit back before continuing to read. “His spider-genes are the cause of this… It says here: ‘
Subject can’t thermoregulate. Exposure to cool temperatures causes lethargy and eventual paralysis. Subject can’t raise or maintain its own body temperature and has to be warmed up manually
.’”
“Alright… Alright…”, Bucky nodded, trying to comprehend this new information. “So he’s basically in hibernation. We’ll have to warm him up, then.”, he decided, leaning over the boy to pick him up. “We should move him back to our base.”, he stated, picking him up bridal style before looking back at Yelena. “We saved all this data to our servers?”, he asked her.
“Yeah. We got everything backed up. I’ll wipe their servers.”, She nodded, pulling out the drive that carried the virus that would clean out all the local devices of this base. Before she could initiate the wipe, Bucky stopped her for a moment.
“Wait. Can you check one more thing before you wipe it all?”, he asked her. Bucky didn’t know why this was so important to him all of a sudden, it wasn’t information that they couldn’t look up later at their base. For some reason, Bucky felt like it couldn’t wait. “Does the file say his name anywhere? Not just his code name.“
There was just something about calling him
the boy
in his head and the devastation in the boy’s eyes when Bucky asked him if he remembered who he was… Bucky needed to know his name, he needed to give the boy an identity.
“Wait, let me check…”, Yelena mumbled, searching for a moment. “I think this is it!”, she then exclaimed. “Peter Parker.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
They moved the boy, Peter, to their operating base. Luckily they were based locally, so they didn’t have to go very far. It was just a short drive to Brooklyn, where Bucky had bought a property. An old warehouse, transformed for their purposes. It wasn’t Avengers Tower, and maybe it was closer to the ragtag HYDRA base they’d just uncovered, but it was under their control.
Bucky reported their takedown of the HYDRA base to his contact at Avengers HQ. Sam was in the process of rebuilding the Avengers and he was in full support of Bucky and his team, but he let Bucky have oversight over their comings and goings. They would take care of the cleanup, as long as Bucky could give them a full report with extensive proof of HYDRA’s crimes. They had more than enough of that. This way they could focus on the boy that they were bringing home now.
After reporting the HYDRA base, Bucky went on to request the medical team Sam loaned him every once in a while. Most of the time they were capable of treating their own injuries and if it was a real emergency, they’d go straight to Avengers HQ. But in some cases, the team would come to them. That was one of these cases. Peter didn’t seem to be in any acute danger, but they still needed specialists to take a look at him. Once Bucky had that covered, he returned his attention to the boy and his team.
“What’s our ETA?”, he asked, looking up at Yelena who was driving. He was sharing a car with her and Alexei, while the others took the second car. This way Bucky could take up the whole back bench, with Peter sprawled across his lap.
When they’d found him, he was only dressed in a pair of briefs. Knowing that he couldn’t thermoregulate on his own, they’d wrapped him in an emergency blanket and turned up the heat in the car. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but at least it got the process of warming him up started. Bucky could already see the effects.
Peter wasn’t moving much but Bucky could see the boy’s fingers begin to twitch slightly and his lips were starting to move, too, like he was trying to say something. He remained conscious, his focus switching between staring at Bucky and glancing around. There was still panic in those eyes and as much as Bucky wished that he could relieve him of his fear, it also reassured Bucky in a way. Peter wasn’t a cold emotionless machine. Whatever they’d done to the boy, they hadn’t managed to bury his humanity entirely.
“We’ll be there in 15 minutes.”, Yelena replied, keeping her eyes trained on the road.
“Hear that? We’ll be there soon, and then we’ll get you all warmed up…”, Bucky told Peter, doing his best attempt at a caring tone. Peter didn’t look like it did much to calm him, but Bucky tried to not get discouraged by this. After all, the boy had no reason to trust them. “I promise you… You’re safe with us. No one is going to hurt you again… We’ll take care of you…”, he just kept on whispering, hoping that Peter was even capable of processing what Bucky was trying to tell him.
“I have to say, I’m surprised to see the Winter Soldier be so sweet. Didn’t think you had it in you.”, Alexei smirked in that abrasive way of his, and Bucky couldn’t help but roll his eyes.
“He’s a kid, man.”, he sighed, giving Alexei an annoyed glare.
“Sure, but I know you’ve killed kids before.”, he pointed out and Bucky knew that he was just trying to rile him up. Alexei loved to do that. Usually, Bucky didn’t mind but it really wasn’t the time.
“You know that he’s conscious, right? So maybe keep that shit to yourself?!”, Bucky snapped at him and Alexei raised his hands in a mocking gesture of innocence.
“My bad, Buck! I won’t say a thing.”, he then stated, but Bucky knew that he was full of shit. There was no changing him and Bucky knew that arguing with Alexei would bring him nowhere right now, so he swallowed his frustration and returned his attention to Peter. He tried to gauge if Alexei’s comment had worsened Peter’s emotional state but it was hard to tell when he could barely move the muscles in his face.
Bucky couldn’t help but wonder how Peter had turned out like this. He’d never heard of HYDRA experimenting with human and animal DNA splicing before. They were usually all about recreating the super soldier serum. He’d never seen anything like this. Or at least he hadn’t seen it coming out of a HYDRA lab.
That didn’t mean that it didn’t ring any bells for Bucky, though. In fact, he knew that he had encountered something…
someone
like this before. Years ago, when he’d still been more Winter Soldier than Bucky, when he’d been on the run and getting framed for terrorism, Bucky remembered a fight on the tarmac of an airport in Germany. Steve was facing off with Tony, two sides, two teams, and Bucky could remember a boy… Tony called him Spider-Man, dressed in a red and blue suit. He could climb walls, shoot webs, and was strong enough to block Bucky’s arm with ease.
Bucky wished that he could remember more of that time, but his brain had still been too scrambled back then. Still, he tried to tell himself that this couldn’t be the same person. There was no way. After all, Spider-Man had been on Tony Starks team, surely someone like that couldn’t just randomly end up in HYDRA custody. People would’ve noticed.
Knowing this didn’t get rid of the strange feeling Bucky got when he thought back to these days. He decided to look more into that later, just to make sure that there wasn’t anything he was missing. For now, he would focus on getting Peter better.
_
They arrived at their base shortly after. When Bucky had bought the building, he’d renovated it to fit their requirements. It was outfitted with top-of-the-line security systems, a hangar for all their vehicles, a quinjet landing pad on the roof, their own lab and med bay, arsenals and training facilities, and of course, living quarters for all of them. After all, they were all people with no roots and no places to call their homes.
They drove into their hangar and closed the base down after both cars were inside. Bucky knew that it was a risk to operate from the city and Sam had offered him a space in the old Avengers Compound. But Bucky liked the independence, and he missed Brooklyn. So they build their home here.
“The med team will arrive with the jet in 10 minutes.”, Bucky announced as he got out of the car and picked up Peter, carrying him to their med bay.
“Should we wait for them, or do you want to get started on warming him up now?”, Ava asked, following closely after Bucky.
“As much as I would like to put him in a hot bath immediately, I think we should wait and see what the Doc says.”, Bucky sighed after considering the question for a moment. “But it would be good to get his file from the data we recovered, to give the med team as much background as possible.” He then added.
“On it!”, Yelena exclaimed, rushing past him and towards one of the workstations in the med bay, getting started on uploading their newfound intel to their servers.
Bucky headed over to one of the medical exam tables, placing Peter on it as gently as possible. Bucky wouldn’t lie, even after all these years, any medical equipment made his skin crawl from years of medical torture, but he had learned to push it down. Based on the way Peter’s eyes shot around and his bottom lip trembled, he felt the same. “I know this might freak you out, but we aren’t going to hurt you. We’re just trying to help. I promise.”, Bucky tried once more to reassure the boy as he connected him to several monitors, keeping track of his vitals. His body temp was still way too low. His heart rate and breathing were barely there, but stable. It was baffling to see someone with stats that low,
fully aware
. Bucky still couldn’t quite believe it.
The medical team arrived not long after. Doctor Frey, a general practitioner that was specialized in super-humans, because that was apparently something that existed now, was accompanied by a team of two other doctors and three nurses. Bucky had worked with her several times now. She was remarkably young for how accomplished she was. When Bucky had met her for the first time a few years ago, she’d still been in her late 20s and Bucky could admit that he’d underestimated her. Now he knew better, though. Frey was a genius and Bucky would trust her with his life without a second thought.
Yelena gave her the quick rundown of everything they had found on Peter in the HYDRA files until now. Bucky was sure that they would find more, but it would take time to decrypt all the data. Luckily Doctor Frey agreed that based on the information they had, it was the best course of action to get Peter warmed up. She also pointed out, that his body was basically in stasis and that getting him warmed up could be the only way to discover if there were any other health complications that they didn’t know about yet.
The plan was to warm him up slowly so that they could keep an eye on his vitals in case he took a dip out of nowhere. This way it would give them more time to intervene, in case he took a turn for the worst. Dr Frey decided to achieve this with a combination of heat lamps, heat packs, airway rewarming with humified oxygen, and giving Peter warm fluids through an IV.
Once she was made aware of Peter’s miraculous consciousness, she took the time to introduce herself to the boy and explain everything she was about to do, even if Peter wasn’t capable of communicating with her in return.
What followed were the longest 5 hours that Bucky had experienced in a while. The process of raising Peter’s body temp, even though quicker than it worked for a normal person, still felt endless to him. It probably didn’t help that he just stood by the entire time, not letting the boy out of his sight.
The rest of the team checked in periodically but went about their business as usual otherwise. They patched up their wounds, showered, ate, and rested. Bucky couldn’t step away. He couldn’t explain to himself why he was this invested. He didn’t know Peter, he had no personal investment in him, but still… He couldn’t bear the thought of abandoning him.
Even that didn’t make sense. It’s not like Bucky’s presence mattered to Peter. He didn’t know him either. Bucky was just as much of a stranger to the boy as the team of doctors monitoring him. Still, Bucky couldn’t help it. He stood guard. If something happened to the boy while he was under Bucky’s care, he needed to be present.
“How’s it going?”, Yelena asked eventually, yanking Bucky out of his inner monologue once more.
Fuck
, she’d snuck up on him again. Bucky had to get his shit together.
“Okay, I think.”, Bucky mumbled, even though he didn’t know if he was qualified to determine that. He glanced over to Yelena and found that she was freshly showered, her short platinum hair still damp, and dressed in a comfy set of sweatpants and a hoodie. Bucky couldn’t help but wonder how much time had passed. He had lost all track of time as he watched the doctors work.
“He’s back to 82 degrees, which is finally in the realm of normal hypothermia. His vitals have been steadily rising too. So far there’s been no crash.”, he went on to explain.
“That’s crazy… Is he still conscious?”, Yelena asked, narrowing her eyes at their patient.
“Sort of..”, Bucky replied. “They sedated him.”,
Yelena gave him a confused look at that. “Why would they do that? Don’t we want him to stay conscious?”
“Yeah, in theory. But as he’s warming up, he’s regaining control of his movement again. Which is great, he’s not paralyzed,
hurray
, but-”, Bucky started to explain before his voice trailed off. He remembered how the boy started to thrash and struggle against the doctors about an hour ago, trying to yank out his IV. There’d been something
animalistic
about him in that moment that felt all too familiar to Bucky.
“He tried to fight them, didn’t he?”, Yelena guessed and when Bucky looked over at her he found a haunted look in her eyes that Bucky probably carried too. He knew that he didn’t have to explain it to her. They both knew what it felt like to be treated as a medical test subject. Both of them would most likely react the same way if they were to find themselves on a stretcher surrounded by lab-coats they didn’t recognize.
“He calmed down after the sedation.”, Bucky simply nodded, trying to push his own haunted memories away. “He’s got a hell of a resistance to it. They gave him enough to knock out someone like me but he’s still somewhat awake. He slips away from time to time but he’s not fully passing out.”, he went on to explain. Peter had metabolized any drugs they gave him at a rate that rivaled Steve’s. Bucky wondered, not for the first time, what kind of serum they’d given the boy.
“What are we going to do once they’ve got him warmed up again? How do we get him to not attack us as soon as he gets the chance?”, Yelena asked. Bucky hated thinking about this. He hated it because he’d spent hours thinking about it by now and he knew what the safest course of action would be. The safest option would be to restrain him before taking him off the sedation to question him. Bucky couldn’t do that though. He knew that if Peter woke up chained down, there was no way he was going to be able to trust them in any capacity. So even if that would’ve been the safest way, Bucky had dismissed it.
“I’m working on that.”, he told Yelena.
“Is that what you’re doing here? Working on it?”, Yelena then asked with a slight smirk, and when Bucky gave her a questioning look she rolled with her eyes. “Bucky you’ve been standing here for hours. You haven’t even washed up, you’re still covered in blood.”
“So?”, he asked, after glancing down at himself. She wasn’t wrong, his tactical suit was splattered in the now-dry blood of those HYDRA agents. He hadn’t even considered that he should probably get changed.
“I’m just saying, if you’re nervous to leave him, I can stand guard for a while, give you some time to clean yourself up, eat, write a report for the goody-two-shoes upstate.”, Yelena offered before giving him a cheeky grin. “Come on, Barnes. I’ll call you over as soon as something changes.”
“You know what would be helpful? If you could write me that report.”, Bucky suggested mostly as a joke. He knew that she was right. Bucky wasn’t helping anyone but his own anxiety by lingering while the boy was still mostly knocked out.
“Yeah… I’m not doing that. You know how much I hate writing in English.”, she waved him off with an exaggerated eye-roll. Yelena was a polyglot like all the widows, but Bucky knew that she still hated writing in the latin alphabet. Bucky and her texted in russian most of the time.
“Ahh, I figured it was worth a try.”, Bucky chuckled before letting out a heavy sigh. “Fine, I’ll go.”, he finally agreed. “Please just… call me as soon as anything changes.”, he insisted.
“I promise. Now go.”, she agreed and Bucky took one last look at the boy on the stretcher, before turning his back on the med bay.
-
It took another hour for the doctors to raise Peter’s temperature to a healthy level. Just enough time for Bucky to shower, grab a snack, and type up a quick report. When he returned to the med bay, he found Yelena sitting in an office chair, still watching over Peter as she had promised. “Look at you! Looking like a person again!”, she smirked as he approached.
“Yeah, you were right.”, he sighed. He did feel a little better. Bucky hadn’t noticed how deeply this whole encounter had rattled him until he stepped away. Now he felt more grounded. He felt like he could actually handle whatever was about to happen next. “How’s he doing?”, he asked, allowing himself an anxious glance at Peter. From afar it didn’t look like much had changed while he was gone.
“The Doc says he is pretty much back to a normal temp. She just did a general exam and wanted to give us a rundown on his health.”, Yelena explained and as if on cue, Doctor Frey stepped away from Peter, approaching them.
“Welcome back, Mister Barnes. You look better.”, the young Doctor smiled at him.
“Thanks, and I told you before, you can just call me Bucky.”, he returned before looking back over to Peter. “How’s he doing?”
Dr Frey gave him a nod before launching into her rundown of Peter’s current state. “His body temperature is back to normal now, his vitals are stable. I took the liberty to run some general exams on him. He doesn’t seem to have any injuries aside from the burns on his scalp and the wounds from the restraints on his wrists and ankles. I disinfected and bandaged those wounds, but based on the last few hours I am certain that he has exhilarated healing abilities. The wounds have already started to close up on their own. That’s probably also the reason for the complete lack of scaring on his body. It’s difficult to tell how powerful his healing factor is, because of his extreme malnourishment. In my experience, individuals with an enhanced metabolism, like yourself, rely on a way higher calorie intake and when they don’t receive enough nourishment, their powers suffer for it. So getting him on a healthy diet is a priority right now. He most likely won’t be able to handle solid food for a while and we really want to avoid refeeding syndrome. So we’re working on a nutrition plan for him. For now, he’s getting the nutrients via his IV. That’s all we could tell for now, For more information we’d have to run more detailed tests and it would also be beneficial to find more records of what was done to him in those files you recovered. But for now, he’s stable.”, she explained.
Bucky did his best to take it all in. Medically speaking, Peter’s condition wasn’t as bad as he had expected. The malnourishment was a big concern but aside from that, Peter seemed to be remarkably intact. That was probably thanks to his healing factor.
His mental state was a whole other question. Doctor Frey told them that they were still keeping him sedated for now since he had reacted with great distress whenever he regained consciousness.
During his break, Bucky had decided on a course of action. It wasn’t ideal but it was the best plan Bucky could manage. They were going to move Peter’s bed to one of their holding cells. Those were as secure as possible. There they would take him off the sedation. Bucky would stay in the room with Peter and try to communicate with him once he woke up, to get an idea of the boy’s mental state.
They wouldn’t be tying him down. Bucky was categorically against that. In case Peter freaked out, Bucky was the only one he’d be able to attack and the holding cells had their own ventilation systems that were capable of dispensing a gas that would sedate them.
Again, it wasn’t ideal, but it was the best they could do on short notice.
So they moved Peter to one of the holding cells and raised the room temperature to 98 degrees. Doctor Frey took him off the sedation before leaving Bucky in the cell with Peter. The door was sealed behind her and Bucky glanced back at the two-way mirror. He knew that Yelena and the Doc would be watching his interactions with Peter, in case they needed to intervene. Now all that Bucky could do was wait. He’d taken a chair into the cell with him since he didn’t know how long it would take for Peter to regain consciousness.
In the end, it didn’t take long at all, probably because of Peter’s accelerated metabolism. The wait couldn’t have been longer than thirty minutes. With no warning whatsoever Peter’s eyes shot open and zeroed in on Bucky immediately.