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He remembered running down a stairwell with Tony at his side, and then a swarm of yellow darts from every direction that bounced harmlessly off of Tony's armour, and then -- nothing.
*
The next time Steve woke up he felt like his skin was on fire, veins burning from whatever they were pumping into him. The world swayed and gradually steadied itself, resolving into a brightly-lit room with a mirrored ceiling, gleaming white tiles lining the walls. His distorted reflection was visible in the lenses of half a dozen different video cameras arranged around the room, their blinking red lights bearing silent witness to his predicament.
Steve was strapped to a cold metal surface, tipped back slightly from the vertical. Some kind of monitor was set up to his right, beeping at regular intervals. Fighting the nausea brought on by his movement, he turned his head and saw the IV port still in his arm. He ached all over, feeling sharp lances of pain deep in his chest and gut and spine when he flexed against the restraints.
A swarm of white-coated men and women milled around the room, absorbed in various tasks. One scribbled frantically on a clipboard while another read out a series of numbers from a set of green-capped vials. Others were packing away a set of ominously large syringes. A tall man walked up to Steve, quick and nervous like a wading bird. He unceremoniously grabbed Steve's jaw and shoved a cotton swab in his mouth to scrape the back of his throat. Steve gagged, but before he had the sense to bite down the man had already capped the swab and hurried off, writing something indecipherable on the label in black marker.
There was a drain in the middle of the tiled floor, looking wet and freshly scrubbed. How long had he been here?
Steve focused on the raw feeling in his throat and came a little more into himself. HYDRA's scientists had obviously improved their anaesthetic game since the last time they'd tried this shit. He didn't know how long he'd been out, had no sense of time passing like he did in normal sleep, and he made a mental note to check in with Bruce about the latest in suspicious new pharmacology patents. They apparently didn't fully trust their new chemical restraints, as he was still trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey.
Or a frog pinned to a dissecting board.
Steve looked around, trying to get a sense of his surroundings. A portly man with a ginger beard was talking into a phone on the wall, his answers sharp and clipped.
"Because I'm understaffed."
Steve blinked, there had to be at least two dozen of them scurrying around. How much staff did an evil scientist need?
"Yes. No. I don't need it, we can just do the TESE procedure after Stage 2 and -- oh hell, I don't know, I'm not a urologist -- fine. Fine, we'll do the standard sampling procedure before then, I suppose. Yes sir." He hung up and sighed, turning to look at Steve.
No, not at Steve. Behind Steve. Ginger Beard was talking to someone standing behind Steve. "You know the drill. Just do whatever it is you do when it's you, we're on a tight schedule and I literally do not have time for this. We need to be in Stage 3 by four o'clock."
Steve's heart rate kicked up, adrenalin temporarily overcoming the fuzz of the lingering anaesthetic in his system. Stages. Stages were never good.
"Why Sorensen had to pick today of all days to get food poisoning--" A timer dinged. "Ah, my bronchial cultures!" and he rushed out of the room, leaving the rest of the technicians to swarm into the space left by his exit.
Well, almost all the space. A ten-foot radius that encompassed Steve and the table remained conspicuously empty. Steve's mouth worked as he tried to make himself swallow. He knew. He could feel it, he didn't have to see to know who it was.
The Winter Soldier -- no, Bucky, it was Bucky, he had to believe it was Bucky -- leaned in from behind him, close enough that Steve could hear the whisper of his hair brushing across his collar. Steve tensed as the protruding buckles and straps of the Winter Soldier uniform grazed his bare skin, armour creaking as he reached across to do something to Steve's IV line. Steve could smell it, the rich organic reek of leather, over the antiseptic and steel and that Sparkleen powder scientists seemed to be so insistent on using. Bruce always washed his glassware with it, beakers and flasks and graduated cylinders arranged neatly on pegs over the big lab sink to dry. What had -- he was drifting again, he'd been coming back to full consciousness a moment before, what had--
He snapped back to focus as Bucky stepped in closer, resting his considerable weight against the sloping examination table. Bucky leaned against Steve's side, still fully clothed, and Steve abruptly realized he was totally nude. He worked up the guts to look down at himself and suppressed a sigh. A plastic-coated black ring was wrapped snug around his balls, another just below the head of his dick. Both were hooked up to red and black wires running out to some kind of machine connected to that beeping monitor, covered in blinking lights and dials. More wires emerged from underneath him on the table, and Steve had several unpleasant thoughts about where else they might have placed electrodes while he was unconscious.
Steve shuddered involuntarily as Bucky's combat trousers scraped across a large patch of missing skin on his thigh, the exposed tissue red-raw and throbbing. The metal hand slipped under one of the restraints and hope flared in Steve's breast for a moment, then fizzled as Bucky simply adjusted it tighter and moved on the next, methodically checking each one.
Steve managed to swallow, and croaked out "Bucky--" and that's when he felt it. The first buzzing jolt in his groin. "Bucky, no, what are you doing, what's happening." No. No. This was going all wrong.
"Bucky, help me, help me get you out of here," The build-up this time was sharper, faster. God, what had they--
Bucky pressed him bodily down against the table, ensuring Steve had no wiggle room at all as he ratcheted up the last of the straps. "No, Bucky don't, you have to remember, don't--"
Bucky's eyes met his, unnervingly calm. "It's easier if you don't fight," he said. He was so quiet Steve had to strain to hear him. Bucky's eyes flicked over to the open door, and Steve saw that Bucky had angled himself to shield them both from the scientists and technicians working at the lab bench by the wall. His long hair fall down over his face, hiding him from the cameras.
Steve opened his mouth to reply but Bucky covered Steve's mouth with a warm, calloused hand. "Mmff--"
Steve struggled against the newly-tightened restraints, breathing hard through his nose and ignoring the strange, sharp pains that lanced through his chest from the effort. After a minute and another cycle of electricity did nothing to calm him, Bucky's free hand went back to the IV line and Steve's head swam. He slumped back against the cold steel, dizzy and sick. This was all wrong, wrong. It was supposed to be Steve pulling Bucky off that table, helping him to his feet and getting out of that horrible place together. And now he'd failed again, he was still failing, Bucky was right there and he was just as trapped as ever.
Another jolt went through him and Steve groaned. It wasn't pleasurable, exactly, as much as it was weird and intense. Steve panted behind Bucky's hand as he waited for it to pass. Bucky showed no sign of impatience, just waited for Steve to wear himself out.
After that wave subsided, Bucky finally responded. "Let me help you." Steve let out a muffled yelp of surprise as a cold, metal hand touched his chest, fingers stroking feather-light across his pecs. Bucky was still so quiet that Steve doubted the technicians even knew he was speaking. "The first time was hard," and Steve's stomach lurched at the implications of that statement, "but I won't let them hear you."
Steve thrashed even harder, ignoring the deep pain in his hipbone where a syringe had sunk and extracted -- something. Off to his right Steve saw a technician carefully labelling a clear bag filled with viscous, red fluid. They were totally ignoring him, he was just another interesting specimen all laid out for them to cut apart and study, God, where was Tony, he'd been right behind--
"Stop it. You're hurting yourself." Bucky tucked in even closer against Steve's side. The metal buckles on his jacket dug into several different sutured incisions, and Steve winced. Bucky seemed not to notice, intent on holding Steve steady while the electrical current pulsed through him once more. Steve could feel his cock filling up with blood, though he was fervently willing it to stop, and he gave himself a moment to hate everything about modern science. He stared up at Bucky pleadingly, hoping against all reason that he'd suddenly develop telepathy or the ability to sink through the table or telekinesis or something, anything useful ...
Another wave passed over him and this time his thighs and ass clenched in sympathy as his cock bobbed towards his chest, heavy and hot with blood in an apparently involuntary response to the electrical stimulation. It was hard to get enough air, with Bucky's hand still clamped over his mouth and the pulses coming faster. He could feel his whole chest flushing red under Bucky's cold metal hand, nipples tightening in the cool air of the lab as Bucky traced patterns over his skin. Not the words or coded messages Steve hoped for, but spirals, swirls, and aimless jagged lines Steve didn't understand and couldn't respond to. Steve desperately wanted to get away, couldn't stand knowing other people were right there, the technicians working just a few body-lengths away from the two of them. Bucky was holding him tight and just watching him.
There was a minor flurry of activity as Ginger Beard burst back into the room, carrying clear tubing and a flash of steel in one hand, and several precariously-balanced glass bottles in the other. Steve tried to get a closer look but ended up throwing his head back and gritting his teeth as his cock jumped, throbbing as current passed through it. Bucky's hand smothered the whine threatening to slip out behind his teeth.
"Oh, good, he's responding adequately," Ginger said, a bit out of breath. "Wasn't sure whether the benzodiazepine mix would suppress cardiac function too much to--"
"I told you!" a woman interrupted him from across the room. "I told you, just increase the etomidate and use a blocker and Denhoy's new NPP derivative instead of fentanyl--"
"Yes, well," Ginger continued, flustered. "The collection apparatus is all here, and for God's sake gag him if you need to. I can't be distracted while I'm fractioning off the pleural fluid." Bucky accepted the tubing with his metal hand but didn't lift the other from Steve's mouth. Ginger fluttered for a moment before stacking the bottles on the monitor and dropping a few thick strips of fabric on top.
Bucky hesitated, glancing at his hands and the pile of equipment, then seemed to come to a decision. His hand came off of Steve's mouth for a second, and Steve got out, "Bucky no, don't, please don't--" before his mouth was full of the sterile, dead taste only achieved by autoclaving something repeatedly for ten years. Bucky knotted the gag tightly behind his head. Steve didn't even get a chance to attempt to spit it out because then he began to shake and shake and shake as the next cycle ripped through him, leaving him writhing soundlessly on the table. Bucky surreptitiously wiped the corner of Steve's eye with a bit of fabric before he looked over at the machine, frowning and adjusting one of the dials.
Steve had only gone limp for a few seconds when Bucky moved to grab the collection apparatus, whatever that had meant -- and then Steve suddenly realized exactly what that meant and bit off a scream as a hollow metal rod slipped into his urethra. It was lubricated, thank God, but this was nothing like being catheterized, this was thick and solid and unforgivingly cold -- it was--
Steve’s muffled yells of protest were totally ignored by the lab coats, who were busy pipetting nearly-indistinguishable liquids from one tube into a series of smaller tubes and then putting different kinds of coloured stickers on the results. Someone was shouting something about histology and sample contamination as Bucky jammed the free end of the plastic tubing onto the valve at the neck of one of the glass bottles, but between the drugs and the electricity Steve was finding it hard to concentrate.
Bucky returned to Steve’s side, actually managing to shove his arm under the small of Steve's back this time. His bulk blocked out a good third of the room and Steve did his best to curl into him, welcoming any familiar anchor in his confused mix of anger and humiliation and fear.
Whatever the machine was, it seemed to have an accurate measure of Steve’s arousal levels, or maybe it was directly monitoring his vital signs, it wasn't clear. At any rate it must have decided that Steve was ready for the next phase because the pulses in his groin accelerated, each one coming faster and lasting longer than the one before. He was clinging to the idea that Tony must have gotten out, Tony was armoured and unaffected by the darts, Tony would find him, when the ache in his balls reached a new peak. He felt them contract in painful spasms, spurting liquid out into the steel cylinder seated deep in his cock. Steve could see it dripping into the collection bottle set on a shelf beside the machine, suctioned out through the plastic tubing using some method Steve didn’t know and didn’t care about. He bared his teeth in a silent scream as it went on, and on, long enough to realize this was not an ending and nobody was going to switch it off anytime soon.
The device extracted pulse after pulse after pulse of semen from him in a sine wave of orgasm, never letting him recover between peaks. When his production started to taper off, the machine began to vary its routine, alternating shocks to his balls with more stimulation to his sensitive cockhead, and eventually Steve's suspicions about what had happened while he was unconscious were confirmed as he felt other electrodes light up deep in his ass. Steve felt like Bucky's warm arm under his back and metal thumb stroking his cheek were the only things keeping him conscious. "You're doing fine," Bucky murmured, lips brushing against his temple. "They're not watching, they don't care," and surely none of them could see Steve crying, not with Bucky's body shielding him.
Some unknown amount of time later, after a very petite technician had switched out the glass collection bottles twice -- holding each one critically up to the light each time and writing notes furiously all over it before handing it off to a colleague -- the shocks stopped. Steve would have sagged in relief if he hadn't already already been a sweaty mess against the table.
"OK, push another litre of saline and let's move into Stage 2. There'll be plenty of time for behavioural analysis after reprogramming. Remember, we're only interested in baseline physiology right now. Follow the workflow plan, let's keep this moving!"
A team of technicians wheeled a complicated apparatus over to his head and cut away the gag with safety scissors, only to replace it with a ventilator mask. Steve shouted Bucky's name until the paralytic set in.
He faded out as they intubated him. Steve wasn't a quitter, but he was glad he didn't have to see what happened next. Tony claimed that his rescue was both disgusting and a triumph of modern organometallic chemistry, and Steve felt like he had just about had it with science by that point.
*
Several days later, Steve sat beside Natasha in Bruce and Tony's lab, staring at a series of blue-and-white printouts and frowning. Bruce and Tony had begun a discussion of modern anaesthetic technology that devolved into a heated debate about the nature and meaning of consciousness, and Steve wasn't in the mood for either philosophy or first-person narratives about psychotropic drug use in the 1970s -- no matter how interesting Bruce's early career had been, there was nothing as boring as hearing about somebody else's acid trip. And he wasn't sure that Tony had as firm a grasp on Jungian psychology as he seemed to think he did.
"So, my liver really will grow back?"
Natasha looked over at him. "Oh, yes, definitely. Even in normal people, the liver regenerates really well. They actually took less from you than they would have if you were going to donate, and living donors' livers regenerate to ninety percent of their original size within a few months."
Steve considered this. "Huh."
"It looks like they didn't have time to get to your kidneys at all. Dr. Connors was a nephrologist, did you know, I'm sure he's terribly disappointed." Behind her, Tony was attempting to illustrate one of the archetypes of the collective unconscious using discarded paper cups and hand gestures, while Bruce shook his head in disagreement.
"Well, we all have our disappointments."
"Bruce said he personally destroyed each one of those samples. It wasn't hard to find them all -- they kept meticulous notes. They were a very organized working group of mad scientists, I've never seen anything quite like it. You should have seen their spreadsheets."
Natasha paused. "Steve -- give it time. Your face looked a lot worse last time."
"Are you saying my face looks nice?"
Natasha's lips quirked up into a smile. "I would never say that. Your face is terrible."
Steve laughed quietly and let out a long breath, feeling a bone-deep weariness that went far beyond the anaesthetic still working its way out of his system. "I just worry," he said softly.
"I know. Me too." Her small hand covered his, and he laced their fingers together, squeezing gently.
They sat there quietly until Steve fell asleep, head tipped over to rest on Natasha’s shoulder. Consciousness wasn't always everything it was cracked up to be.
***
EPILOGUE
Partial transcript reconstructed from fragmentary audio recordings of HYDRA MSWG VII procedural meeting 16.2
DELGADO: Listen, it’s really quite interesting if you think about the underlying physiology--
JOHNSON: [indecipherable]
NAKAMURA: Oh for the love of--
CONNORS: I say, this is an outrage--
[loud banging, 8 seconds]
CONNORS: We've been through at least fourteen iterations of work flow plans to develop the most efficient, productive use of this particular specimen, and by God if you bring this back to the committee AGAIN Delgado just because you want to move up the endoscopy when everyone KNOWS you're only interested in duodenal biopsies I'll vote against you at the next funding review, see if I don't.
[loud banging, 13 seconds]
NAKAMURA: [expletives]
CONNORS: At least Nakamura's fixation on bar-coding and triple-labelling everything we take has increased our productivity; can you imagine what a mess we'd be in if we'd stuck with your "take audio notes and label everything afterwards" approach, Johnson? The mad sciences indeed, what does you think you’re playing at, this isn't an autobody shop, it's an operating theatre! Have some professional pride.
JOHNSON: [indecipherable]
SORENSEN: I’d like to bring us back to the new methods for bone marrow extraction that my doctoral candidates have been developing. Along with skin grafts, I think this could be an interesting angle to attack the problem of tissue regeneration in--
DELGADO: Oh, so cosmetic repairs are now more valuable than growing entire new organ systems? When my research team has already perfected--
NAKAMURA: Nobody cares about your precious bead-tissue lattice, I’ve never heard such [expletives, con’t 11 seconds]
JOHNSON: [indecipherable]
[loud banging, 28 seconds]
End transcript. Refer to mission report 2014.10.3A-224-Rogers for further discussion of procedural details.