Come Together

Chapter 3: Friends

There was no doubt that Barnes' condition was only getting worse. The healing runes that Tom reapplied when no one else was looking could only do so much, and now that Barnes' wounds had healed, there wasn't any blood left for him to work with. He even managed to steal away a pen to help, but ink had a much weaker impact than blood did, and did next to nothing in helping treat Barnes' walking pneumonia. To heal a disease rather than a simple wound required a much more complex array, as it dealt with something spread much more thinly than a large wound, which he couldn't get away with even if he did have enough to write one with.

Barnes himself had seemingly caught on to what Tom was doing, as he weakly lifted his head to the young British wizard while he was carefully drawing a slightly more complex rune before any of the HYDRA guards looked his way.

"What've you been doing to me?" he had questioned groggily.

"Trying to heal you." Tom answered vaguely, eyes darting around to see if anyone had heard Barnes, and seeing that a couple of his cellmates were glancing his way, but none of the guards.

"You don't heal people by writing on them," Barnes groaned, feeling his chest where Tom had first applied the rune to heal his injuries, "but when you wrote that stuff here...I felt my bones fixing themselves. How did you do that?"

"I learned how." Tom told him, finding himself unwilling to lie but equally unwilling to spill out the truth, continuing to carefully draw out the new rune.

"I've never heard of any kind of healing that only needed writing," Jones cut in, and by the look of the others' faces, they shared the same sentiment, "that's, like, magic and shit."

Tom did not answer them, instead choosing to pull down the shirt to hide what he had been drawing and stuffed the pen under his shirt. He waited for the guards to pass before lifting the shirt again to continue his work, starting on the next part of the array.

"Remember when Stubbs kindly pointed out that I was a freak? Let's just say it's something like that." he answered with his head lowered, not liking the way Barnes' eyes seemed to flash in something akin to pity.

Since Tom was the least physically adept out of the healthy members of the cell, he was usually the one left to tend to the man. That and because while they didn't understand what he was doing, they did see the effects it had, and let Tom do what he needed to do in hopes of him curing Barnes' ailment. While in a disease-filled haze, Barnes began to ramble. He would groggily relive part of the battles he had fought before he was captured, twitching away whenever he heard a loud bang go off somewhere in the facility. Sometimes both Dugan and Jones would explain to Tom what the man was rambling about, probably to give themselves something to focus on other than the fact that they were still captives here.

Barnes would also talk about a childhood friend of his, one that couldn't stop running away from a fight. Apparently Steve Rogers tended to take quite a beating from the neighborhood kids, and it was Barnes that had to patch him up. It made Tom's chest clench a little, and he wondered what it would have been like to have someone at his back when he was beaten by the other children at the orphanage. Barnes had answered him, as Tom had accidentally muttered the sentiment out loud, that if he didn't have anyone, Barnes himself would fill the role. Tom knew this was probably delirium talking, but it still made his chest lighten.

Soon, however, despite Tom's best efforts, Barnes' pneumonia still stubbornly stayed. The soldier could barely lift his head off the ground anymore, and his breathing had grown ragged. When the guards came by, they did not pass their cell like usual, instead opening the cage and dragging out an unconscious Barnes. Tom and the others were held back, pushed down and the cage door locked in front of them. They could only watch as their comrade was dragged away to who knows where. The mood in the cell dropped after that, and the anger and helpless feeling lasted for a good few days.