The Hurt And The Healing: Bucky X OC

Chapter Forty Two: The Woman

TW: stress positions, implied rape/non-con, torture

Go to https://environment-other.ambient-mixer.com/in-the-lair for an ambient soundtrack for this chapter.

B didn't remember much of what life was like before the cold white rooms, but he missed it. All of it, not just the soft touches that danced through his mind or the warm smiles that plagued his dreams. He missed the red rooms of yester-life, with the harsh words muttered in his ear and the hands grabbing him while electricity coursed through him like a live wire. Those days had been dark, but at least he had some semblance of an understanding of who he was. Some memory of who he was.

This realization came roughly half way into his seventh stint in solitary confinement. The stress position today was simple enough. He had been forced to his knees and made to lean back at a forty five degree angle with his arms crossed over his chest. It was incredible how much pain could come from a pose so uncomplicated. But the pain was there, and so brilliantly horrible that it took him the better part of a day to formulate that thought.

Granted, it might have been two days since he had been locked in his cell and left to the mercy of his tattered mind. Maybe it had been just a few hours. It was impossible to gauge how much time had passed by anything other than how much his wounds had healed. The first break in his arm was mostly better, although it had been snapped in two other places since then. And his calf muscles had been sliced four more times, not that he had tried to run away. The soldiers had just done it to him without warning. They did a great many things that seemed to have no purpose but to destroy him.

S. B. Three. Two. Five. Six.

It was all that he could remember, but he kept repeating it to himself. Not out loud, that had gotten him a muzzle with a piece of rubber that went several inches down his throat, which brought back some memories that the Omicron waves had yet to obliterate. Movoniv had warned him that the machine and techniques were different from the ones used by the people within the red room, and he had been honest. Where the red room was a mallet to the brain, these people were a laser to the- wherever memories were kept. B had once known what it was called, but he had once known many things that were now lost to him.

Like the rest of the sentence he was supposed to be repeating. S. B. Three. Two. Five. Six. Or was it three two six seven? He wasn't sure, and he hoped that the point was not to remember all of the numbers but to have something to think about other than what was happening to him. Because not only had he forgotten several of the numbers, but also where he had heard them in the first place.

By the time the soldiers came to drag him to his feet and out of the room B had settled on the numbers being three two six seven. As they kicked him so that he fell to his side and then continued to kick him for the hell of it he closed his eyes and pictured the numbers. When he finally opened his eyes again the numbers were still there, burning before him. They moved with him, and he reached out with his left arm to try and grab the six before it could vanish. But his fist closed around air as it bobbed away.

"Still fighting back, Zimski Vojnik?" one of the soldiers demanded. The man stepped on B's outstretched metal hand, forcing it to splay on the ground. He then grabbed the other arm and did the same thing to that hand, shattering several bones in the palm and fingers.

B hissed in pain but nothing more, still staring at the numbers. They splintered apart like his bones before reforming into new numbers, eight, five, nine, six. He frowned and wanted to shake his head but managed to have the presence of thought not to. As if to reward him for his self control, the numbers broke and reformed once more, this time into what they were supposed to be: three, two six, and four.