Chapter Text
January 2016
“ — so that’s, uh — that’s what happened.” Winter reached up and rubbed at the back of his neck with his metal hand and Rumlow spent a weird dizzying few seconds remembering how that hand felt on his skin the few times Winter had been lucid enough and comfortable enough to touch him during post-mission prep. His eyes were stuck on where the metal fingers dug into the soft space below his left ear, the soft space Rumlow fucking dreamed about, the space he ached for, and then his mind got stuck further on the image of what might happen if he just leaned across the couch and tugged Winter’s hand away and pressed his own mouth there instead —
Then he registered Winter had quit talking. Winter was sitting there quietly, watching Rumlow with his head tilted a little. Some of his hair was falling over the plated joints of his hand. Rumlow remembered like being shot through his throat the way the asset had twirled his hair around and around his finger on the roof in Poland —
“Commander?” Winter said, and it occurred to Rumlow he hadn’t actually said anything in a while. He forced his eyes to Winter’s, the sheer startling blue of them. He cleared his throat — it felt like scraping it with sandpaper — and said,
“You not gonna tell me the rest?”
Winter’s head tilted more. Fuck, Rumlow wanted to touch him. “The rest?”
“Yeah. Like, Steve said he’d help, okay. If it was at Thanksgiving then I was still in D.C. at the time. How’d he get — ”
But then he stopped. It clicked all at once. He felt like someone had just hit him in the face with a sledgehammer. He felt kind of stupid and kind of annoyed with himself and kind of annoyed with Winter and none of it was specific enough for him to pin down and analyze. He noticed his hands were shaking and he couldn’t tell if it was from the damaged nerve endings or if it was the adrenaline of this fucking unexpected conversation.
“You sent that SHIELD bitch — agent — you sent her to my, to where I was staying,” he said. “You got me the apartment in Manhattan.” And then, like being smacked again from the other side of his skull: “Fuck, you — Steve found me — I’m here now ‘cause you — ?” He was aware he was talking out of his fucking head, incoherent. Likely these were not exactly the hugest leaps to have made; Rumlow was pretty sure anyone without fucking brain damage and slowed reflexes would’ve figured it out a long time ago, or at least as soon as Winter started showing up again, hanging around Rumlow’s house
(fuck, of course he’d known where the hell Rumlow lived, he’d fucking picked it out)
and coming to him again and again, that quiet desperate sadness in his eyes, in the soft plush lower lip —
— Winter hadn’t been faking at all. This whole fucking time. He was here because he wanted to be. He was here because he’d already known Rumlow had come here. He’d ordered it. He’d risked his fucking relationship with his best friend for Rumlow — this — this was —
“ — talked to Tony, like Natalia suggested,” Winter was saying, still so, so soft. He’d lowered his metal arm and was staring at his hands folded gently in his lap. “So the form letter Steve gave you in Manhattan is something they print up for everyone who goes under SHIELD’s protection — they just change the obvious stuff, like the address and your name… Tony’s a billionaire, so he funds the credit cards, it’s not a big deal for him.”
Rumlow couldn’t hold back the rough scoffing sound which clawed its way up his throat. “Sure he’s fuckin’ thrilled about funding some ex-Hydra — ”
“I told you I talked to him,” Winter said, and Rumlow couldn’t stop the thrill that ran down his spine at the fact that Winter had interrupted him. Of course it was not the first time but the novelty had yet to wear off. “So did Steve, I think… he didn’t, um, he didn’t really want to discuss it much with me…” His mouth twisted wryly in one corner. He was still staring at his hands. The metal joints shifting over each other, clicking quietly against the carefully maintained nails on his right hand. “But Tony doesn’t mind.”
“Having my fuckin’ phone lines tapped probably helps,” Rumlow muttered. He regretted it almost immediately as Winter flinched. He felt the urge to reach out and take his hand and just as quickly shoved it down the stairs. Rumlow remembered how once he’d thought of all his old instincts burned out of him the way left-handed kids were forced to use their non-dominant hand for centuries. How even when they were grown and the right hand had long-since become the first resort, there were moments when the left arm would twitch deep down within itself, or something in the left wrist, and the impulse would still have to be physically suppressed.
Rumlow reaching out to Winter was his left hand. Pierce screaming in his ear about attachment and softness, the endless looping nightmares of Pierce taking the asset away, raping him again and again, leaving him a bloody fucked mess on the ground to die at Rumlow’s feet because Rumlow hadn’t been able to keep a certain look off his face or a tone from his voice —
— that was all the right hand. And it rose up again now and squeezed and pulled until Rumlow’s urge to touch and placate and apologize had passed. Pierce was still winning —
— but something in Rumlow had broken open during Winter’s story, and now it lay weak and helpless in the gutter, waving its naked limbs, whimpering softly, desperate, and Rumlow could no longer fully suppress his fucking left hand, the hand that Pierce had cut off years ago. It was growing back now, emerging from the ashes alongside the urges and feelings which had lain smoldering beneath years and years of training and frustration and the boiling slow-burn hatred which had choked and consumed him from ’97 on —
“I asked them not to tap your phone,” Winter said to his hands. “But Steve — I told you the other day. Steve wouldn’t let me come unless I made some agreements.”
Rumlow stared down at his own stupid, fucked, shaking hands. The scarring on his wrists. The skin was callus-hard and warped. The twist of burnt skin on his inner wrist. “What,” he tried; he found he couldn’t go on, but it worked as a complete sentence, at least for Winter:
“He said he wanted me to call every three weeks minimum. Just to check in and talk — and that he wanted your phone lines tapped so if you tried to, to sell me back, or — ” his cheeks were faintly pink — “or if you were gonna kidnap me, whatever, they’d be able to trace whatever calls you made and come find me.”
Rumlow snorted; he couldn’t help it. Winter’s eyes cut up to his, and Rumlow held out his wrists. His fucked eyebrow arched in its corner. “Think you’ll have to do most of the work on that kidnapping one, Win,” he said, and Winter laughed — actually laughed, the sound startled out of him. His smile looked not unsimilar to the one he’d had in the picture in his file. It made Rumlow smile too, feeling the stiff muscles pull up. His stupid unused broken crooked smile. But Winter wasn’t judging. He was just sitting there. He was sitting there because he’d fought to be sitting there, he’d sat in a courtroom and fought and pleaded and he’d gotten Rumlow out of going to jail, he’d gotten him out of —
“What about right at the beginning,” Rumlow asked. “Right after the trial, when I went to Manhattan.”
“Steve called a lot of people,” Winter said. “He called um, he called Nick Fury — ”
(won’t cap notice his long-dead best friend killing his boss?)
“ — and Natalia convinced him to make the case, to remind Nick what I told you, that she was in that Russian program and he got her out.” His mouth twisted again. “I don’t really know a lot of details because Steve didn’t want me in on that much, either. But between Nick’s position in SHIELD — what’s left of it, I guess — and Steve using his leverage as Captain America they managed to make a deal with the government.
“Once you were in New York Steve wanted me to drop it and I tried and — ” he was pulling a little on a hangnail on his flesh hand with the metal fingers; he didn’t seem aware of what he was doing. Rumlow didn’t think about it, just reached out like he’d wanted to before, like he’d ached to, like he should have all those years ago, reached out and taken Winter’s hand and run —
— he reached out and took Winter’s metal hand and pulled it away from the flesh one, and Winter went completely still beneath his touch. Rumlow went still too; looked at Winter’s face, ready to pull back —
— but then Winter curled his fingers inward. The tiny quiet mechanisms of them whirred softly; all the tiny delicate precise gears required to mimic the fine motor control in a human hand. Luke Skywalker at the end of Empire, and Rumlow remembered vaguely how the first time he’d seen the asset and his cryochamber he’d made a similar comparison to Han Solo, and he smiled a little —
— Winter was holding his hand so gently, and the metal palm felt warmish at its center, and Rumlow thought with a little thrill that maybe for the first time since April 2014 Pierce was going to lose.
Winter looked at Rumlow’s face. He tilted his head. “What was I — ”
“Once I was in New York,” Rumlow said gently. Winter’s cheeks went a little red. He dropped his eyes back to their joined hands.
“I tried to stay away,” he said. “I tried but I knew where they’d sent you and a couple times I, I saw… I saw what people, how they treated you.”
Rumlow tensed; he couldn’t help it, it was reflexive. A look of panic crossed Winter’s face and Rumlow consciously forced himself to relax, to squeeze down on Winter’s hand, to say,
“No, it’s all right, keep going, I just — sorry,”
and Winter swallowed, studying his face for a few seconds before continuing:
“I didn’t see much, ‘cause it was hard to get away from the tower. But I saw enough.” Something tightened a little in his jaw; defiance or anger, or both, something blistering and wholly unfamiliar to Rumlow on that face, the face where he was used to seeing only compliance and deference and submission.
“Someone wrote to Steve and said, Hey, Cap, tell your buddy with the missing arm he oughta thank me when he’s in Queens. I’m fixing his old friend right up. So Steve had Jarvis trace the letter and he said who it was from and Steve went and found him and asked what he meant. And he said he was sending you really bad things in the mail. Packages of shit. He was trying to get his hands on, on cyanide, and I was so scared, and, and I c- I couldn’t let it happen — ” His jaw was tightening further with the memory, and Rumlow squeezed down on his hand again. Winter’s eyes snapped up to his from where they’d drifted back down, and after a few seconds he said,
“I talked to Steve and Tony. Like I said. And we came up with the rules I had to follow so I could come here. But it — I’m not sorry. I know it was a big decision. Steve still doesn’t like it. But I’m not sorry I saved you and I’m not sorry I got you out of New York and I’m not sorry I’m here now and — ”
“Soldat,” Rumlow said, gently enough Winter could’ve kept going if he’d wanted, barreling over him, but he skidded to a halt like they were in the field. Like Rumlow had issued an order. It shot down his spine and up into his head in dizzying simultaneity. The rush of power he’d always felt around the asset. The idea he had this thing in his control, his complete control, this thing which was capable of such violence and lethality, the greatest weapon of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the most formidable and feared assassin in Hydra’s ranks, and all he had to do was say a word, just one little word, and that same weapon would be at his side, in his arms, ready to fire, to throw a knife, to strangle —
Something brief and hesitant bloomed warmth between his legs. But it was gone before he could focus enough to make it stay.
He remembered when Winter had first come back to him, how he’d felt the weight of so much crushing guilt over the fact that he wasn’t happy to see a more autonomous Winter because it meant the compliant submissive asset he’d known and worked with for seventeen years was gone. That all his years of wishing he could take the asset away from people like Pierce or Rollins had nothing to do with wanting the asset to be a whole person complete unto himself, but that he wanted the asset to be his, to be Rumlow’s alone. His own private personal weapon he could keep all the time and never have to share or pass around —
— not kept locked away in a glass case like Pierce would have, and not laid out on display in various graphically sexual positions for everyone to come over and enjoy looking at and touching like Rollins or Sitwell might have — but in his own home. Where he could do as he liked with him; where they could take their time and explore whatever feelings or desires as they came up. No pressure, no rush. No one standing outside the door banging on the wood and yelling for Rumlow to hurry up. Just the two of them, and Rumlow knew the asset was intelligent, Winter was intelligent, after all he’d discussed Harry Potter in depth with him on the rooftop in Poland, and now with nothing to interrupt them surely they could talk about more, they could do more —
— but he knew damn well it was only selfish. It was only because he wanted the Winter he remembered. The one that did his bidding and acted as his own weaponized extension, that acted upon Rumlow’s command, stopped when he said, killed when he said, got hard when he said —
— he’d felt guilt over wanting all that. But now it was starting to look like maybe Winter wanted it, too. Winter who had fought his way across half the country through unmoving obstacles like Steve Rogers and his self-righteous stubbornness just to be with Rumlow again. Not because Rumlow had ordered him to come back, or because Winter was being mistreated in New York, but of his own volition. He wanted to be here. He’d tracked Rumlow down. He’d taken him out of a shitty situation —
— which in and of itself was already more than what Rumlow had done for Winter —
“Why aren’t you angry with me?” Rumlow asked, and he hadn’t realized he was going to say it until he opened his mouth, but it felt like a good enough question.
Winter furrowed his eyebrows slightly. Rumlow sighed.
“Why don’t you hate me?” he said.
Winter almost rolled his eyes. Another thread of warmth teased its way between Rumlow’s legs. It probably could’ve been embarrassing, or something, but it felt fucking good. It had always come as a bit of a shock how good arousal felt around the asset.
“I just told you,” Winter said.
Rumlow made kind of a face, inasmuch as he was able to these days with his scars. “Right,” he said, “yeah, but that was testimony for the trial, and that was months ago, I just don’t get why — I mean, I never took you away. The… what the prosecutors said. It’s true, I didn’t — I left you with them. I could’ve helped you out and I just fucked you over for my own — ”
“It wasn’t perjury,” Winter said. “I wasn’t lying on the stand.” Their hands were still loosely clasped between them, and Rumlow felt Winter’s fingers flex along with the soft mechanical whirs of them. “I wouldn’t have defended you if you had been cruel to me, Commander.” He reached up with his right hand, then, and touched the side of Rumlow’s face. “You weren’t cruel to me.”
“But — ”
“I’m sitting on this couch with you ‘cause I want to be here,” Winter said. His thumb was stroking slowly over Rumlow’s scars, over the stubble which had grown erratically around the ruined skin. Rumlow wanted to lean into the touch and he wanted to close his eyes and he kind of wanted to cry a little bit. “I know it isn’t — conventional. But I don’t care. You never hurt me. I never wanted to forget who you were.” His eyes were shining. The sight of it made Rumlow’s chest tighten.
“No one else except Nat trusted that I know what I feel,” Winter said softly. “I need — ” He swallowed. He had a strangely familiar expression in his eyes, and it took Rumlow a long time to realize where he’d seen it before: it was the way he’d looked at him during post-mission prep after good missions, when he’d recognized Rumlow, when Rumlow hadn’t been another faceless horror. It was faintly pleading and desperate and aching for things that the asset hadn’t understood the source of or why he wanted/needed them —
— but Winter did. Or else he wouldn’t have come here. Or else he wouldn’t have risked his entire trial outcome to get here. His friendship with Steve, his already-fucked reputation —
“I need you in my corner,” Winter said. His voice was hoarse, a little broken at its edges. “Please, Commander, I — I just want — ”
His metal hand tightened in Rumlow’s; it still didn’t hurt, and maybe that was because of Rumlow’s dead nerves and maybe it was because Winter knew how to gentle his touch, but he felt the last of his resolve crash to the floor. He pushed deliberately into Winter’s hand on his face; he said,
“Win,”
and Winter made a rough, torn-open sound, and he leaned in a little, pulling Rumlow forward by the back of his head. Rumlow’s mouth was already falling open even before their lips touched, and he felt the soft catch of Winter’s skin — warm, a little dry — against his own. He slid his free hand up Winter’s right thigh and heard his breath catch in his throat; he pressed in harder, his own lips parting. Rumlow couldn’t remember the last time he’d kissed anyone — maybe the mid-nineties, maybe longer, when he was much younger and stupider, when he was still learning how to fake his way through sex in college and after. This was nothing like that, of course, because nothing he did with Winter was ever like anything else. He licked into Winter’s mouth, his tongue scraping his lower teeth, and Winter exhaled shakily, the sound ending in a whine. Rumlow could feel the tip of his nose brushing against his cheek and he squeezed down on Winter’s leg, using the leverage to drag himself forward a little more, sliding his hand up Winter’s side, feeling the heat of his skin through his shirt. The familiar curve of his ribs and the steady solid pounding of his heart.
Winter opened his mouth further. It felt like he was giving up a part of himself to Rumlow. An offering splayed out on some makeshift altar to a blood-hungry god, a god with nine arms and regenerating heads, and one of those heads had at last managed to chew off every other head until only it remained, and it could take its time with the sacrifice, maneuver it as it liked, lick over its body, over the sweat-soaked heaving chest, wrap one of its arms around its waist in support, holding it steady —
Warmth burst for a third time in his lower stomach, and he held onto it like a drowning man, biting Winter’s lower lip, eliciting another groan from his throat. He lifted his hand off Winter’s side and ran it up into his hair, tugging gently. Winter moaned, pressing helpfully and eagerly into it, and Rumlow kissed him and kissed him until his heart was threatening to burst from his ribs, until he had to draw away and press his face against the side of Winter’s neck, feeling overwhelmed, biting his own mouth to savor the taste —
— but the warmth was fading out, and went more rapidly the harder he clung to it, and he hid his embarrassment and frustration and anger neatly under the sheer, startling joy at having Winter where he fucking belonged, and kissed his neck, and then under his jaw, and then at last captured his mouth again, gentling his touch in Winter’s hair, soothing over his scalp as Winter let out a desperate, pleading sob.
--
It turned out that Rumlow wanted to kiss Winter a lot. Thankfully Winter was very much on board with this plan, and they settled into a routine like they were back in the field. Every morning, or nearly, Winter came over and they walked to Café du Monde together. Or if it was a bad day for Rumlow’s legs Winter picked the coffee up on his way. Either way generally before the sun rose — Winter slept about as much as Rumlow did — they ended up drinking coffee and eating beignets. Then they’d walk around for a while until Rumlow got tired, and then they’d go back to the house on Esplanade and make out like fucking teenagers. They went to a few stores as well, but Mardi Gras was a pretty constant looming presence and Rumlow didn’t really want to leave the house. Winter seemed happy with this arrangement as well, burrowing against Rumlow’s side on the couch, watching television, neither of them really talking, relaxing in the silence. It satisfied somewhat the raw burning ache which had been present in Rumlow’s chest now for nearly two years. He hadn’t realized how weighted down he was by his own anger and resignation until Winter slipped back into his life.
It turned out, too, that no amount of making out and touching could get Rumlow’s fucking broken dick back online. It was clear that Winter wanted it, and it was clearer still that he wasn’t going to push for anything — why would he — but Rumlow still felt fucking guilty and terrible every time they were pressed together on the couch and Winter made little desperate noises in his mouth and Rumlow had to ignore the hints and pretend he didn’t notice. I can’t, he’d said, the first time they’d spent the whole day together, when Winter’s hand started drifting further and further up Rumlow’s thigh. Winter had tilted his head and looked at him, evidently confused, but he hadn’t pressed. Rumlow wasn’t even sure why he couldn’t explain it; it wasn’t like he had anything to be ashamed of with Winter. It was Winter, for fuck’s sake. But he just — he couldn’t. He couldn’t, and he knew he could touch Winter, he knew he didn’t need to be hard himself for it to work. But he wanted —
— fuck. It was stupid. But he wanted to be able to have sex with Winter properly. Not like Pierce had demanded. He wanted to be able to get off with him, on him, in him; he wanted Winter to suck him off like he’d dreamed of for years, and he wanted to take them both in his hand at once and stroke, and he wanted to get Winter in his lap and thrust up into him until Winter was fucking wrecked and sobbing in his arms. He wanted to touch Winter like he always had, yes, but he also wanted Winter to know — to see — This is what you do to me. What you’ve always done to me. You didn’t fight for a year and a half to get here for nothing. I would have killed Pierce for you and I’m sorry I didn’t get you out sooner, but you still want me for whatever reason and it’s the same for me. I want you. I’ve always wanted you. So fucking badly.
Sometimes Winter stayed over, because the parades were rolling now and it was hard to get back to his hotel after a certain point in the evening. They’d lay in bed or on the couch and Winter would doze off against Rumlow’s chest, metal hand gently curved around Rumlow’s wrist, and Rumlow would stroke his hair and stare at the ceiling, listening to the faint shouts and music drifting over from Decatur or Bourbon, and he’d think of the terrible irony that Pierce had lost in so many ways —
— but he’d found a way to wedge himself back in and gain another victory, anyway.