Flesh and Bone ◇ Bucky Barnes ◇

XXV: Electric Blue

Joana

"This man," Pierce said, gesturing towards the Doctor, "We call him Lud. It's Bosnian, meaning-"
"Insane, I know."
"Aren't you smart? Anyway, he's nothing like you or I have seen before. He trained directly under Armin Zola. He's a genius. A crazy genius. He's the only reason we've gotten Barnes to the state he is in now." Pierce looked at Lud with admiration, staring at Bucky as if he was some kind of achievement. "You're about to witness something so brilliant. We've done this before, but we're confident it's going to work far better than the times before."
Joana looked towards Bucky, who was sitting in the chair as if it was just any normal chair, not whatever death machine Lud had created.
"You're going to wipe him," she said, the sudden realization a pain to her heart. Pierce smiled.
"You're catching on, Joana."
Joana shook her head, tugging on the buckles keeping her chained to the chair.
"Pierce, stop. Please. Don't do this. Don't," she pleaded. Bucky looked straight at her, but he didn't see her. He looked right through her, as if she wasn't even there. "Please."
Pierce said nothing.
"What are you feeling, Soldat?" Lud asked Bucky, sitting in a normal chair beside him.
"Cold. I have a headache," Bucky replied. Lud scribbled on his pad of paper. He tucked the pencil behind his ear, skewing his glasses slightly. He turned to one of the agents in a lab coat behind him.
"Do it."
The agent pushed a button on one of the table the machine Bucky was sitting in started to whir. Lud pushed the chair and Bucky backwards so the machine could easily slip onto his head.
"What is this?" Joana asked Pierce, her voice full of fear. "What is this?"
As soon as the head set of the machine latched on to Bucky's head, he started to scream. Heart wrenching, guttural screams came from his mouth, bouncing off the metal walls. Joana pulled against the buckles around her wrist with every ounce of strength she had.
"Stop it!" She shrieked, her voice drowned out over the sound of Bucky's screams. "Please, stop!"
Tears formed in her eyes as she watched, helplessly, as HYDRA obliterated the mind of one James Barnes. Joana's protests and Bucky's pained screams produced a cacophony of anguish. Had you heard Joana, you might have assumed she was the one with a crude machine attached to her head.
"Alexander, please. Please, stop him," Joana begged once she no longer had voice enough to scream. Pierce looked at her in surprise. He stared deep into her tear-filled eyes. "Please."
Pierce looked away from her as the machine stopped. Bucky's screams slowed to a stop, but as Lud pushed the chair back to it's original position, Bucky started shaking, sweating terribly. Before he even had the chance to rest, Karpov walked around him with the red book, reading those ten words that Joana knew all to well. Bucky didn't even flinch as they were read.
"Soldier?" Karpov said, standing in front of Bucky once he had finished.
"Ready to comply," Bucky replied.
"Bucky!" Joana called out, leaning as far out of the chair as she could. Bucky didn't even react to her voice. "Bucky, it's me. It's Joana."
Lud pulled the pencil from behind his ear again.
"What are you feeling, Soldier?" He asked again. Bucky stared straight ahead, his voice void of all expressions.
"Nothing."
The single word chilled Joana to the bone. She slumped back in her chair, her heart pulsing in her chest. She felt as if she couldn't breathe. Lud looked up at Pierce with a smile. Pierce breathed deeply and grinned.
"Lud, Karpov, prep him for his mission. Everyone else, get out of here."
Each agent nodded. Karpov and Lud helped Bucky out of his chair and half carried him out of the room. After they had gone, the rest of the agents left, just as they were told. Pierce and Joana were the only two in the room. Pierce paced back and forth in front of Joana, hands stuffed in his pockets.
"You know, Joana, after all these years, I thought I had you pretty figured out. You'd do anything to protect James, wouldn't you? You would hide your feelings, sleep with men who obviously revolt you, kill, be killed. There isn't a thing you wouldn't do for him," Pierce said. "You'd even call me by my first name, which is no something I've ever heard pass your lips."
Joana set her jaw. She had been desperate. She hoped it would force some kind of emotion into his heart that would help her. She seemed to be wrong. So she tried a different approach.
"I know, Pierce." Pierce turned to her and laughed.
"What do you know?"
"I know that you have feelings for me."
Pierce looked amused. He leaned against a table in front of Joana and crossed his arms.
"What kind of feelings might I have?" he asked.
"You're in love with me," she told him with the shrug of her shoulders. "Or, at least, you think you are. Since you're a psychopath, I'm not sure you can even feel love."
"What makes you so sure I'm in love with you."
"Face it, Pierce, a good leader would have killed e a long time ago. I'm a threat, constantly. I've betrayed you, tried to kill you, lied to you. I'm a loose end, unstable. The worst you've done is torture me."
"You died."
"And you made sure I came back. You thought if I killed Salazar that it would somehow make up for everything you had done to me because I hated him almost as much as I hate you. I lied to you for two years, Pierce. I told you nothing about Bucky and Natalia. I was shot in the stomach and I heard you had the agent that did it executed. Yet here we are. I'm still alive. You can't kill me because you're afraid to live without me. Man up, Pierce. You're in love with me." Pierce set his jaw. She could see in his eyes how right she was and how badly he wanted to punch her in the mouth.
"You got me, Joana. I can't kill you. I tried to stay away from you after I almost killed you because I was afraid I was going to do it again. That was almost unbearable. Every second I'm away from you, I crave just the sight of your face."
"How romantic."
"Don't do that to me, Joana. Don't." Pierce lowered his head. "I'm sorry, for everything. I know you don't care."
"You're right. I don't."
"I'm leaving in a few weeks," he said to her.
"When will you be back?"
"Never, I think. I'm going to America, to work with SHIELD. You and Barnes should be coming with me in a few decades, once everything's in place."
"I won't miss you," she replied. "If that's what you were wondering."
"You won't have to. Karpov will be here. He'll be taking my place, doing the things I would have done. But, don't worry, he won't touch you. He knows you belong to me."
"I don't belong to anyone, Pierce."
"You keep telling yourself that, Dear Joana."
"Don't call me that."
Pierce narrowed his eyes at her. He pushed himself off the railing and walked towards her.
"You know what, Joana?"
"What?" A sarcastic smile played at her lips, her head tilted as if she actually cared.
"You're lucky."
"Ha."
"I'm serious." Pierce paced around her, encircling her like prey. "If Danika hadn't liked you, the Commander would have killed you before you even had the chance to betray him. If I didn't like you," Pierce chuckled. "You would have been dead a million times over. You're lucky that people have taken a liking to you. You had Aleksi, in the early days, who was so infatuated with you that he constantly asked for pardon on your part when you upset the Commander, but you killed him."
Joana shifted in her seat, clenching her jaw, at the mention of Aleksi.
"I'd hardly call his abuse lucky."
"You just don't see the bigger picture. Then, of course, there was Danika, who loved you so dearly that she died for you. Does it still bug you that, instead of being there for her in her final moments, you were busy murdering someone she used to love?"
"Danika did not love Aleksi."
"See, that's what you think. But she and Aleksi were very much in love. She was apart of HYDRA and wanted to get out, he was not apart of HYDRA and wanted to get in. He obviously achieved his goal and hoped that, by gaining the approval of the Commander, he could marry the blonde beauty that was Danika Stark. However, this only set the Commander's eyes on her, so he separated the two of them. He became unstable without her. Then you came along."
Joana had tears in her eyes. Her lips trembled as she spoke.
"That's not true. She would have told me."
"Get over yourself, Joana. Danika didn't tell you everything. Just like you didn't tell her everything. Shall we continue?" Joana said nothing. She looked passed Pierce to the other side of the room. "After Danika and Aleksi, you were pretty much alone for a while, just you and your pent up rage. Then we moved to the Red Room and you met Natalia. How much did it hurt when you learned that your friend had been sleeping with the love of your life? And you let them do it in your own bed?" He laughed. "I bet you didn't sleep in that bed after that."
Joana tried to keep all of her emotions in check, but with every word he said, it felt like a balloon blowing up in her chest. Any second that balloon would pop and Joana would snap.
"How about when you quite literally died for them and they still treated you like the third wheel? Or when you told Natalia that you loved Bucky yet she did nothing about it? That's gotta sting."
"That's enough," Joana said, curling and uncurling her fingers around the arm of the chair.
"I don't think it is, Joana. Did you really think you could call me out like that and not feel the backlash? Let's talk about Doctor Salazar."
"How about you shut your mouth before I shut it for you."
"A touchy subject, I see. He saved your life, under my orders. He helped you through physical therapy. He treated you like a patient, and not some crazy lady who had killed people for a man who didn't know her. But then you learned that he knew you were pregnant and didn't tell you! Not only that, but he also took away all ability for you to have children ever again. How did that feel?"
Joana lunged at Pierce, but her restraints kept her to the chair. She smiled when she saw Pierce flinch slightly.
"Then there was the fact that you almost killed Salazar when he told you and that your dearest Bucky Barnes was the only person who could calm you down. Isn't that sweet? The kind old Doctor told us every detail of the way Barnes held you as you sobbed. I should have seen the way he carried you out of my office after you tried to shoot yourself. Anyway, he told us all about it. Once we knew Barnes broke the Soldier's Grip, we assumed from there that you had lied to us, that Barnes and Romanov were more than releasing their sexual frustrations on each other. From there, we only had to guess where they would be. Which was easy. It was unfortunate that you were there. But, I guess, it was a good learning experience.
"Now, you have to sit in that chair forever. There are no more chances for you. You don't get to be freed for any reason, except unless we find some new way to torture you. I do have a few ideas in mind. But you'll be spending most of your days there. Won't that be nice. You get a perfect view of your boyfriend's mind going in a blender." Pierce leaned close to her ear. "At least he'll be shirtless, right?"
Joana felt the anger building up in her chest more and more. She could hardly bare to keep it in, but she couldn't give Pierce what he wanted. He was trying to make her angry, trying to cause some kind of reaction. Instead, she lifted her face and stared past him.
"We're done here," she told him.
"Who are you to give me orders?"
"You want to stay?" She asked, turning to look at him with narrowed eyes. He shrugged and walked towards the door.
"You'll be in here by your self for quite a while, Joana. No one opens this door except when Barnes comes back from his mission. When that happens, you'll be fed. Night, night, Joana."
Pierce opened and closed the door without any other words.
Joana struggled against the bonds until a dull pain settled into her side. Huffing, she leaned her head against the back of the chair with a thud. When she lifted it again, she looked out into the empty room.
She silently prayed that God would take her away, that he would take her home to him. Closing her eyes, she prayed that she would bleed out and die before she had to see Pierce again.

***

I fully intend on making the next chapter longer, but I just wanted to get this bit out of the way and I thought it deserved it's own little bit. You guys have no idea how much I want to skip the next 30 years and just get to the part where Bucky and Joana get to spend 2 years by themselves in Romania. That's gonna be fun, don't worry. ;)

My computers about to die, so I'll keep it short.
I love you so very much and every time I publish a new chapter, I can't wait to see your reactions to it. At this point, we're not going to see Natalia until Civil War and there will be a few difficulties there. And yes, maybe Joana should have shot herself in the head when she had the chance, but then who would keep Bucky company in Romania?
That's all I've got for today. I hope you liked this chapter.

I love you all,
authorsbane