Remembering Freedom

Mission Report

She'd been there over a week and there was no sign of the team. It was discerning, to say the least...but she couldn't give up the hope that they were trying. She just had to stay alive long enough for them to find her, which wouldn't be too hard given that all she was really doing for the time being was patch up their agents when they were injured, which was apparently a lot.

She hadn't seen Barnes since her first night. She could recall a couple agents muttering about this really important mission that he was on, but could never get any more than that. She was tempted to ask Ward when he came in later that day, but she clamped her mouth shut, focusing on stitching a nasty slice across his ribs and removing the stitches from his gunshot wound. She wasn't that desperate for information...

"What's the question?"

She pulled out the last bit of stitching. "I don't have a question." She looked over the wound once more, making sure everything was completely healed.

He seemed amused at her response. "The Asset's in New York...in case you were wondering."

Deeming everything okay, she cleaned up the stitching and bandages before having him leave. New York? She thought as she peeled off her gloves and threw them in the bio-hazard container. Was HYDRA after Stark? No, they would need more than Barnes to get into Stark Tower. There was only one other person that lived in New York that could be so important to them: Captain America.

Steve Rogers would be no easy target. He was of equal strength to Barnes and he knew the assassin was Bucky, meaning he wouldn't kill him. He would try to reason with him, to pull his friend out of the weapon that HYDRA had created him to be. But HYDRA had had Barnes for over seventy years and the damage done to his psyche during all that time had probably almost completely erased the man he had been when he fell from the train.

A commotion from the hallway froze her. Jemma nearly jumped as her door was thrown open and the shackle was removed by one of the guards. It must be a serious problem if they didn't even bother with a hood, not like she could really get a good look as she was pulled down the maze of hallways at a speed she was struggling to maintain. She was surprised to find a vault of some kind instead of a medical room.

In the middle of the room, Barnes had just sat down. The chair he was in had a strange contraption attached to the back, two beams rising up and supporting a broken circle. She noticed the mass of plugs and wires coming out the contraption, trying to decipher what they were and what kind of machine this was. Even though she'd spent years with Fitz and had picked up a lot of his mechanical and technological knowledge, this machine made no sense to her at all. Barnes was lying down, with loose restraints around his ankles and right arm. His torso was bare and Jemma could tell from the doorway that multiple ribs were injured and that his right shoulder was probably dislocated. There were two doctors hovering over his left arm, which appeared to be damaged at a few points. Apparently, the attempt on Captain America wasn't successful.

She was forced forward and given a pair of gloves to examine him. There was something off about him...it was his eyes. Those blue eyes that had held nothing the first time she saw them were now full of confusion, almost as if he didn't know where he was. She cautiously made her way over and she found those eyes watching her, his brow furrowed as he tried to remember something. She lightly ran her hands down his rib cage, slightly surprised to find that the ribs were only cracked, not broken.

His eyes were on her as she looked closer at his shoulder and deducing that the shoulder was indeed dislocated and had been for many hours. She couldn't pop it back in with his arm being restrained. She had just turned to address one of the guards when he started thrashing, sending one of the men working on his metal arm flying into the wall with a crunch.