Chapter Text
T’Challa knew, the moment he stepped into the abandoned HYDRA facility, that something was very, very wrong.
Zemo was in his custody now, waiting to be transferred to the United Nations, where he would stand trial. T’Challa had made certain that there was no chance that the Sokovian man could escape before he had gone back in to see what the three Avengers fighting in the facility had been up to. Part of him wanted to see who had won, but the majority wanted to make sure everyone was relatively unharmed over the misunderstanding. And, of course, he had to apologise to Barnes.
Shame tugged at his heart, forcing T’Challa to force his mind away from such matters lest he let his stoic mask falter. Barnes. T’Challa had almost killed an innocent man who was only trying to rebuild his ruins of a life, and had guaranteed that Captain America and his allies would be labelled as fugitives. Not only was it morally wrong, but T’Challa felt that it would be his duty to make sure that Barnes got his chance at rehabilitation.
But the Siberian base was eerily silent, especially since it was supposed to be hosting three very loud fighting superheroes. T’Challa was immediately on guard as he walked through the dimly lit hallways, silent as the air that drifted through it. Nothing.
Then something.
A distant whirring thrummed through the facility, and T’Challa stood up straight and still as he listened to try and identify the sound though several feet of solid steel. A jet, Stark Industries issued, most likely. Wakadan technology was much more quiet than that; T’Challa never would have heard it coming. After a moment, the whirring developed into a steady roar, and then quieted, signalling that the jet was gone.
T’Challa let out a breath. The fight was over, then. Someone had won. Most likely Stark, since there was only one jet leaving and not the rocket thrusters of the Iron Man suit. Captain America and Barnes would be in UN captivity by morning. It was a pity, but he’d do his best to make sure they received due treatment. He moved to leave, knowing that he shouldn't stay here any longer than possible, but paused again.
Something was still off.
Knowing his conscience wouldn't let him leave without figuring what was setting off this sixth sense, T’Challa let out a soft sigh, moving into a room with a ceiling went several floors, all the way through to the freezing surface. Pausing to let his instincts tell him where to go, T’Challa moved towards a side room, with slitted steel walls that revealed the howling Russian wind and snow outside.
Then, he heard it. Ragged, wet breaths.
Alarm firing up the adrenaline in his body, T’Challa rushed to find the source of the breathing. It only took him a moment to find the body lying in a pool of blood. T’Challa rushed forwards, taking off the helmet of his Black Panther suit as he did so and tossing it to the side, knowing that if the figure saw him in the helmet he may panic.
The man he immediately identified as Barnes, and T’Challa’s heart seemed to drop to his feet. He was lying on the ground, blood splattered over his black jacket and metal arm, staining the prosthetic limb a bright red. The other arm was slumped weakly over the source of the blood, as if he had desperately tried to prevent himself from losing more blood. His eyes were closed, and the breaths he had heard earlier were ragged and uneven, obviously taking up most of his energy. The blood seemed to be originating from a wound in the chest, and T’Challa wasted no time in brushing aside the organic arm and hurriedly tearing open the jacket with superhuman ease.
He winced back almost immediately, despite himself. There was a huge gash in Barnes’ chest, which must’ve been only three or four inches left of the heart, on the lung. It was half-cauterized, which probably was the only reason Barnes had survived this long, and even that had to only be because whatever had hit him had been extremely hot and Barnes’ healing factor was rapidly trying to replace the blood he was losing. T’Challa doubted any normal human could last so long with this much blood on the ground.
For once, the young King of Wakanda regretted wearing the Black Panther costume. Apologising mentally for doing this in such cold weather, he tore off Barnes’ jacket, leaving a light gray shirt underneath, more than half of it now stained a dark crimson. T’Challa hurried to remember the medical classes he had taken, and tore off a small section of the jacket to cover the hole, pressing on the sides to try and create an airtight seal. He hurriedly moved to check the man’s lungs, noting how they seemed uneven in size. If he remembered correctly, that meant that Barnes was developing a dangerously low blood pressure.
For the first time, he wished that Shuri had come with him on this mission. She had always exceeded him in medical class and thrived in these kinds of situations. Without her or any real medical supplies anywhere nearby, T’Challa doubted that Barnes would survive for longer than a couple of minutes, even with his help. He closed his eyes for a moment, briefly allowing himself to feel the pain that this had been his fault, really. If he hadn’t so rashly attacked Barnes in Romania, none of this would have happened.
He was honestly still wondering how it had happened. From what he knew, Stark, though slightly self-centered, seemed like a good man. Captain America certainly wouldn’t have left without Barnes willingly, and Iron Man was no (willing) killer. This situation just didn’t make sense. But there was no time to give that question more than a passing thought right now.
Barnes’ breaths quickened, and T’Challa opened his eyes to find two stormy blue irises staring back at him. How the man had forced himself into consciousness, the young king didn’t know, but it was something he found that he could respect.
“Relax, my friend,” he murmured soothingly. “You are safe now.”
There was a question in the former assassin’s eyes, and T’Challa continued.
“I know the real story. You are an innocent man, and I hope you can forgive me for acting so rashly. Zemo is in my custody and awaiting transfer to the United Nations for trial.”
“Steve,” Barnes rasped, coughing slightly. T’Challa switched the bandages on Barnes’ chest for a clean one.
“I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “I came too late too see. But he is alive, and I assure you that I will do everything in my power to make sure he is acquitted of all charges. I believe Stark has him in custody. If so, then he will be treated justly.”
Barnes’ eyes clouded.
“I kill…” he trailed off into a sick gurgle, and T’Challa hurried to help him tilt his head and let the offending blood trickle out of his mouth. “So ma’y. His paren’s. My faul’.” He was exhausting himself, but Barnes seemed almost desperate to speak his last words before it was too late. “‘M sor’. I fora’ve y’ lon’ time a’o.”
Even in his last moments, all Barnes was thinking about was how he had hurt others. T’Challa’s chest ached. How could he ever have assumed that this man would mercilessly kill? But even as he thought of the question, he reminded himself of the facility around them. Of course. From what he had seen and heard, HYDRA could break even the best of men.
“There is,” He spoke slowly, hoping that his message could be understood. “A proverb, spoken in my country and the ones around it. ‘You cannot change the direction of the wind, so turn the sail.’ Your winds have been harsh and unrelenting, Barnes, but you have turned your sail masterfully and made the best out of your lot in life. For that, you have my true, undying respect. And my most sincere apologies.”
Barnes blinked slowly, and his lips twitched upwards, indicating that he understood. His eyes flickered, though, showing traces of fear as they traced the ceiling above them. T’Challa sighed. This man was dying slowly, in complete agony, in the place where he had been tortured for decades, if what he had heard about this facility was correct. All the ex-assassin had was him, a man who, only an hour ago, had been set on killing him.
“We are all victims in this situation,” he sighed, then took a deep breath. “Brace yourself, my friend. I will not let you die in a place like this.”
Hurriedly, he tied the bandage in place around Barnes’ chest, doing his best to guarantee that it wouldn’t move any more than necessary, and picked him up, bridal style. Barnes hissed in pain, and the blood from his wound began trickling onto the Black Panther suit. But T’Challa paid that no mind, crossing the barrier from inside the facility to the windy Siberian tundra in just a few long strides.
Slowly, he knelt down, placing himself under Barnes and turning on the suit’s heater so that the man didn’t feel too cold in his last moments.
“Than’ y’,” Barnes slurred, most likely dizzy from the sudden move. However, his eyes had misted, and as T’Challa watched, one tear slipped out and traced a line down his cheek.
Together, they sat in silence for a time. Then Barnes spoke again, his voice startlingly clear.
“They all though’ I don’ like the snow. But I thin’ it’s pretty. Peaceful. Go’ me through a lo’. When I could see i’, i’ helped pu’ me to sleep. Than’ you.”
“Of course. May our ancestors guide you to peace,” T’Challa murmured.
He wasn’t sure how long the two of them sat there, watching the morning sun crest over the sky in a thin haze of clouds. It felt like years, but surely it must have only been a couple minutes, maybe less. But at one point during it all, Barnes took a last, shuddering breath, then stilled.
T’Challa’s chest constricted, and it took him several more minutes that felt like years to lean over and close Barnes’ eyes.
After what may have been an hour of just watching the sun move across the sky, he stood, picked up Barnes’ rapidly cooling corpse, and walked back to his ship.
If Zemo received several rough bruises and a black eye from not being buckled properly on the flight to Berlin, well, he wasn’t going to complain.
After all, T’Challa, son of T’Chaka and the King of Wakanda, was a very busy man and had some serious work to do.
When the doors to their prison in the Raft opened, Sam was dozing lightly.
Thankfully, though, his sleep was light, perfected from years in the military, various Avengers missions, and excursions into the backwaters of the world looking for Bucky before this whole Accords fiasco. Once the door was completely open, Sam was on his feet and wide awake, Scott and Clint already at the bars.
There were multiple people marching in. Soldiers, if the heavy, monotonous footsteps were anything to go by. Sam shared a wary look with Clint as two, then four heavily-armed SWAT guards entered the holding cell, all carrying AK-47s. More were coming in, guarding a figure he couldn’t see yet save for the hem of their blue shirt from his current position. Clint, several cells down, however, could, and his reaction was immediate, his expression morphing from shock to fear, and then to a burning rage Sam had never seen in the man before.
“You bastard !” He roared, practically throwing himself at his bars with a resounding clang. “Stark, you absolute bastard ! I am going to tear you limb from limb!”
Scott, too, could see who it was, though he seemed too shocked to say anything just yet, simply taking a half step back in shock, mouth working but nothing coming out.
Now thoroughly alarmed, Sam tried to move around the SWAT soldier to see their prisoner, already fearing the worst. It took him squeezing himself into the left corner of his five-foot wide cell, but he was just barely able to get a clear view of the new prisoner.
Part of him already knew who he was going to see, but he still felt as if he’d been punched in the gut when he saw the man. Like the rest of the captured ex-avengers, Steve was dressed in the blue overshirt and pants, with a gray long-sleeved shirt underneath. But Sam quickly realized that it had been everything else that was so horrifying to have provoked Scott and Clint’s reactions.
For one, Steve seemed to barely be able to stand. He took short, shuffling steps, and distinctly favored his right foot, though the short steps may have been from the shackles on his feet. His hands were also cuffed, but in a style Sam had never seen before, his hands completely encased in metal, the two cyndrilic pods attached together on their insides to prevent any movement. His face was covered in wounds, though at least someone had dressed them. There were two particularly nasty scratches under his left eye and the right corner of his lip, padded with white bandages. And as Sam looked closer, he found the outlines of a thicker bandage on the super soldier’s right leg, explaining the limp.
“Steve?” He called out in what he hoped was a calming tone, trying to see if Bucky was behind the super soldier. But there was no one except the guards. Steve himself said nothing, his head continuing to hang low. Sam’s stomach felt as if it’d been filled with ice.
The SWAT team—eight in total, Sam realized, four in front and four behind—shoved Steve towards one of the empty cells, the one right next to him. One of the four leaders stepped up front and made a signal to the cameras, and the door to said cell opened with a creak. The four SWAT men in front grabbed Steve, still completely unresisting, into the prison and shut the door. Without a single word or explanation, they were gone again.
For a moment, there was silence, even Clint going quiet as they waited, almost without knowing it, for Steve to speak. He was out of sight for Sam now, since their cells were side-by-side, so he looked to Clint, who would have a better view, for help. The archer just shot him a rapidly despairing look and shook his head minutely. That wasn’t good.
Then Wanda started crying.
“He’s here,” she sobbed quietly, though the noise felt deafening in the echoing chamber.
The single phrase summed up the complete despair and hopelessness of the situation. Almost as if in unison, Scott and Sam both just collapsed into themselves, while Clint just shook his head and took several deep breaths. Their last true ally was incarcerated. There really was no hope.
“Steve?” Sam finally croaked after a couple moments, breaking the silence with the question the rest of the prisoners knew they needed answered. “Where’s Bucky?”
There was silence for around a minute as they waited with baited breath for the verdict.
“He’s dead,” Steve announced, voice barely above a whisper. “Tony killed him.”
Pepper had come to expect the unexpected. It came in her job description, really, and had become part of her daily life after dating Tony for years on end.
And in the end, it was why she had decided to take a break from both him and their relationship. In the end, Tony’s love of Iron Man had driven a wedge between them that she couldn’t see being mended any time in the near future. It was maddening, seeing him flying off as Iron Man and never knowing if he’d come back, knowing that he was a self-sacrificing moron ready to give himself up for the greater good. It was just so infuriating sometimes, how he seemed to care so little about how he affected others when he did that.
Pepper was no superhero. Her arena of business and management was practically a world away from Tony’s engineering world, and she could usually do little to help him other than manage Stark Industries. So it was probably for the best that they both separated and got their personal lives straightened up a bit before they moved on, despite what Tony said.
Which was why she wasn’t surprised when she heard Tony (and it could only be Tony; he was the only person who would seriously walk in wearing an Iron Man armor) enter her house in Malibu, but rather annoyed. She had an important press meeting in the morning over the Sokovia Accords and was rather jet-lagged from a business trip to Japan, so she really wasn’t in the mood for dealing with another development.
“Anthony Stark, you better have a good reason for this!” She called, not taking her eyes off her computer, where she was scanning over a speech that an intern had written for her to give at a charity event next week.
She got no reply, and after a moment, there was a clanging of metal on hardwood. Was Tony seriously just taking off his Iron Man suit in her hallway ? Too tired to really even muster up the appropriate anger she wanted to feel, Pepper simply sighed, stood up, and marched over to the entrance hallway, determined to give her ex-boyfriend a serious talking-to.
But she didn’t even start.
Because once she caught sight of Tony, she knew something was terribly wrong.
For one, he hadn’t simply discarded his armor, he was practically throwing it in chunks along the floor and frantically kicking off his boots as if they were scalding hot when she came into sight. He was marred by bruises and cuts, all of which were unattended to. He seemed to be on the edge of another panic attack (which was bad. Those had been getting rarer since she’d convinced him to start getting help after the Ultron incident) and looked as if he was about to collapse in on himself.
“Tony?” She inquired softly, stepping forwards tentatively. “What happened?”
The self-made superhero said nothing for a few moments, still preoccupied with tearing off his suit. Once the last piece of his left boot came off, he simply stood there for a moment, shivering despite the seventy-degree temperature.
“I killed him, Pep,” he finally whispered. “I didn’t mean to, but I did. I killed him.”
He kept on muttering the same words over and over, and it was then that Pepper decided that everything else could wait. She simply walked forwards, took him into her arms, and let him cry.
The Raft, for a high-security prison, wasn’t really dangerous, Sam discovered. It was boring.
The days passed slowly at first, almost imperceptibly, until they sped up to just blur together in a sea of monotony. Wake up. Breakfast. Sit around and talk for several hours. Lunch. Be taken down to the heavily guarded gym (save for Wanda, she never left her cell) to exercise for an hour. Sit around some more. Dinner. Go to bed. No phone call home, no natural light (Scott had mourned the loss of his tan half-heartedly), no social interaction with anyone except each other and the guards (who never spoke).
That was it.
Their only source of entertainment came as a book or two appearing and circulated through the cells. Nothing political or recent, all undoubtedly checked thoroughly by the guards. Most of them were the classics, which was also pretty boring. When the books came, they read more than talked. Really, he, Scott, and Clint all avoided talking when some other form of distraction was available. None of them wanted to address the multiple elephants in the room, and the small talk topics they came up with instead just seemed to make the atmosphere all the more forced and tense.
But at least they were talking.
Wanda and Steve said nothing at all.
Wanda, Sam supposed, could be understood the best, being generally unable to move and being shocked when you did move faster than a snail’s pace was just torture for the young woman. It had made his blood boil during their first few days (Day s ? There was little sense of time other than the meals and for all he knew Ross was screwing with those), but now he felt just disconnected from everything. He felt bad for Wanda, that was without question, but he no longer wanted to throttle the guards whenever he looked over at her. He had fallen into a state of weary acceptance with her situation. He didn’t like it, but nothing he did was going to change that.
Steve was who Sam was worried about the most.
Besides that first day when he had announced Barnes’— Bucky’s —death, he’d done, quite literally, nothing. From what Clint and Scott reported to him, he just stared at the wall, ate perhaps half of his meals (worrying, considering they were being given portions for normal men, not super soldiers), and generally retreated into his head. A coping mechanism, Clint had been able to tell him through body motions and subtext. Most likely what the super soldier had done when he’d first arrived in 2012, since only Clint could tell. But back then he’d at least been able to get help.
The only time Steve changed was perhaps seven “days” after arriving. They’d gone down to the gym for their exercise, and instead of just sitting with his back against the wall like he usually would, Steve had just attacked the gym bag with no warning at all. He’d scared all of them (save Clint), half to death and had gone through five separate bags by the time exercise was over. Since they weren’t allowed to get within five feet of each other without being tazed, Sam, Scott, and Clint had only been able to try and sooth him with words. Which, of course, accomplished nothing. Then gym ended and Steve went back to staring at the wall. Rinse and repeat.
Steve was starting to terrify all of them. His muscle mass and general disposition had gone down the drain since he wasn’t eating well. His hair grew out and he got a scraggly beard (well, none of them were allowed blades so all the men had beards, but Sam swore Steve’s was the worst). Within two “weeks” after his first punching bag demolishment, he’d gone from destroying five bags per session to two. He slept more. Reacted only to food and the guards.
Like all of them, Steve had nightmares, but he was military trained and only shivered, twitched, and sometimes whimpered. That was it.
When that happened, or whenever any one of them had a nightmare, Clint would sing. Sam honestly had no idea why the archer had decided to do it, and it did sound off-tune and wavering. But he found, after a little while, that it did help. Clint just seemed to sing whatever was on his mind at the time, from “America the Beautiful” to “Sweet Home Alabama,” even adding in some Russian lullabies he couldn’t have learned from anyone except Natasha, and halfway translated Norse folk songs that most likely had come from Thor.
Those nights, when the lights had darkened and they laid in the dark, it almost felt as if they were home again. Sometimes Sam thought back to that one party they had all attended, right before the whole Ultron debacle. The good old days, only a year ago but they felt like a decade, where Tony and Clint would take stupid dares from each other, Bruce and Natasha would talk about the little things, and Thor and Steve would have drinking contests using the prince’s Asgardian liquor (which Thor usually won, but Steve had the lighter hangover). Sometimes Sam wondered what Thor or Bruce were up to these days, whether they were happy, sad, or dead.
The good old days.
Because the Avengers, no matter what Ross said, were history.
And sometimes the thought became so real that Sam just had to sit back and let the tears fall.
One day their book allowance included The Giver , by Lois Lowry.
Sam took the book immediately; it had been his mother’s favorite book when he’d been growing up. He’d read it so many times that he could recite the plot from memory, and he’d even kept a copy in his apartment for his bad days, when he wanted to pretend to be a child again. He took the book from the guards, flipping it open as he noted that it looked startlingly similar to the issue his mother had read to him as a child.
Flipping through the pages, he noticed several wrinkles in the pages, near the back of the book. Odd, since the books usually given to them were in pristine condition, looking perfect and just off the shelf so that any change to its status could be immediately noted. You know, in case one of them wanted a page from a book for some reason. Curious, he forsook starting at the beginning and flipped to the wrinkled page.
It took place just after a particular scene that Sam had always not liked as a kid because it was so sad and cruel. The Giver took place in a futuristic totalitarian society, where no one felt anything except the Giver and his apprentice, Jonas, who was being trained to feel and act based on emotion. Jonas, in that scene, had just watched a baby be killed because it was an identical twin. Sam’s eyes fell down to that abnormal wrinkle in the page, reading the words that bent over it half-heartedly.
“‘No one must hear you cry’ [said The Giver].
Jonas looked up wildly. ‘No one heard that little twin die! No one but my father!’ He collapsed into sobs again.”
Sam thought suddenly of Steve, sitting just five feet away as he stared blankly into space.
“No one must hear you cry….” He repeated the Giver’s words to himself. His eyes widened. He flipped to the next wrinkle, only several pages later and in the same conversation.
“‘You have the colors,’ The Giver told him. ‘And you have the courage. I will help you to have the strength.’”
Maybe he could help Steve find his strength.
Silently, he thanked the sender of this book, who had to have known that he’d pick The Giver to read, and had painstakingly placed the wrinkles over the quotes that would knock on Sam’s dense skull enough to see what he had to do.
He flipped over to the first page, and began to read aloud, forcing his voice to remain loud and clear.
“It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened…”
It helped, surprisingly. Sam read The Giver up until lunch, getting all the way to chapter nineteen before the book was taken away for the meal. They ate in silence, as usual, but when they were marched to the gym, he caught Wanda’s eye as he passed her cell. The Sokovian woman’s lips twitched up in a silent thanks, and Sam realized abruptly that she didn’t have access to books like they did, with the straitjacket hindering all movement. He felt ashamed for not thinking of it earlier.
But it warmed his chest to know that he was helping out.
During exercise hour, Steve simply lifted a couple weights, only taking to the punching bag for the last fifteen minutes and not even destroying one. Clint, Scott and Sam all unanimously agreed that it was an improvement, and Scott sent him a look conveying some sense of worry (for Steve and Wanda, no doubt) and the beginnings of an idea.
After lunch, the group received their afternoon selection. The Giver was gone, however. Before Sam could decide if he should just start on another book, Scott started reading. It was the Da Vinci Code this time. No doubt from his time as a father, Scott was able to morph his voice into comically bad exaggerated versions of each character, making every accent so ridiculous that when he started on Bezu Fache’s French, Wanda actually chuckled.
Scott was on cloud nine for the next week.
They settled into a new routine. Now, Sam read books aloud in the morning, Scott in the afternoon. After dinner, when there were no books, he, Scott, and Clint swapped old stories, about everything from their childhood memories to pranks pulled just a week before the Sokovia Accords had been proposed. By the fourth day, Wanda started joining in, and the three men jumped on the chance to help at least one of their friends. When their nightmares came, Clint sang to them until they nodded off.
Steve still didn’t talk, but he slowly began to relax. Nine days after establishing the new routine, Clint reported during gym that Steve had stopped staring into space and had been visibly listening as Sam read The Lord of the Rings . He started eating more as well, taking in his entire portion (still too little for him, but it was the best he could do).
Time still blurred, but imprisonment became a bit more bearable. The four of them, save Steve, began to develop a strong bond by the second week, having practically belted out their life stories to each other during their evening talks. Clint, Scott, and Sam had all decided, somehow without talking to each other, that Wanda and Steve were to be cared for and protected.
Steve was 30, Sam realized one day. Thirty. And Wanda was 21.
Damn. Even Sam himself was 34, and he hadn’t gone through half the crap they had.
And the days continued to blur together.
Until one morning, right after Sam had begun Eragon , the cell door opened.
And it wasn’t the guards who entered.