James Buchanan Barnes was in the kitchen. It wouldn't be notable if Barnes was in a kitchen. It was practically inevitable that the guy would have entered a kitchen at some point in the recent past. No, the problem was that he was in the kitchen, Tony Stark's kitchen to be exact. He was standing perfectly still with his back to the refrigerator.

"FRIDAY! Call the others! We need to-"

"Wai-" said Barnes. He didn't even manage to get the 't' on the end.

"Wait?" asked Tony, voice filled with enough skepticism to power a small Midwestern town (if he could ever manage to invent and patent a sarcasm-based photovoltaic cell, which - realistically - was probably at least eighteen months out). "You want me to wait? For what? You already killed my parents and tried to kill me? You want to finish the job? Sure, I'll get the suit and we can go a few rounds."

"Egnh," said Barnes.

"Was that Russian? FRIDAY, translate."

"Sergeant Barnes' utterance appears to be a non-lexical grunt, sir," answered Friday primly.

Barnes hadn't moved at all. Now that the shock was dying down, Tony looked him over. He was wearing black jeans and an oversized sweatshirt. He was shaven, but unevenly so. He was sweating and his pupils were dilated.

"FRIDAY, check his vitals," said Tony, before looking Barnes in the eye. "Why are you here? Are you on drugs or something? Do they even work on you?"

Barnes didn't answer. He didn't even appear to have heard Tony, bloodshot eyes fixated in the middle distance on nothing in particular.

"FRIDAY?" prompted Tony.

"Lacking baseline data for his unique physiology, his biosignature is difficult to interpret. If he is compared to Captain Rogers' baseline, his heart rate, breathing, and galvanic skin resistance all suggest acute distress."

Tony rolled his eyes. So there was maybe a problem, but no information on what problem. Assuming, of course, that Barnes could be compared to Rogers and who knew if that was even true? "Why? Are? You? Here?" asked Tony, over-enunciating each word. "Have you been shot? Are you planning on assassinating me? Are you surrendering yourself to the government? Are you after me Lucky Charms?"

Barnes blinked a few times in quick succession but otherwise showed no response. A few seconds passed and he opened his mouth as if to speak (or perhaps grunt again) but no sound came out.

"All right, it's past your bedtime. FRIDAY, call Rog-"

Before Tony could even finish Steve's name, Barnes let out a horrific noise that sounded like a banshee with laryngitis.

Great, just great. All Tony had wanted was a pesto-and-buffalo-mozzarella-on-honey-wheat grilled cheese sandwich and now he was dealing with the guy who murdered his mother who was apparently too out of it to bait with Yakov Smirnov jokes. "Well, come on," said Tony, beckoning along as he walked toward his lab. "I'm sure I can rig up a basic CAT scan or something."

Barnes' brow furrowed slowly, as though he were struggling to concentrate on Tony's words, or maybe on his gesture. After nearly a minute, he began to walk slowly after Tony, with a strange, stiff gait.

Tony turned around and watched Barnes walk. There was an unevenness to it. The right arm swung naturally with the left leg, but the left arm was stiff. "It's the arm, isn't it? Something happened to it or it just malfunctioned." Barnes didn't answer, but he didn't have to. "So you came to me to fix it, naturally, because I'm just such a nice guy that I'm happy to help repair the Soviet murder arm of the man who literally killed my parents." Tony scoffed. "You've been spending too much time around Captain Perfect. He might do something like that. He'd probably suck your dick to say thanks for the opportunity. But I am not him. I have more sense than that. I'm happy its broken. I hope it rusts and falls off and you have to take a job as Jimmy One-Arm, long-haired mob enforcer."

Barnes showed no sign of having heard Tony's rant.

Tony sighed. He hated not having an audience. "I'm not fixing it," he said. "I just want to get a look at the tech and prove once and for all that mine's better." He gestured to a faintly glowing blue circle toward the middle of the room. "Step up there. We can at least get an X-ray scan."

Barnes squinted at Tony's hands as he pointed to the scanner. He very slowly turned his head in the direction Stark was pointing. Only after doing so did he walk into the ring.

"All right," said Tony, "let's see how those Soviet bastards pulled this off." Tech was tech, and it was rare that Tony got to see craftsmanship (other than his own) that was worth gawking at. A greenish ring of light began to rise around Barnes with horizontal pulses orbiting around it. "I bet they didn't even figure out how to- Holy fuck," Stark whispered, interrupting himself as the preliminary scan materialized. "It's attached to your spine? To your fucking spine? Of course, because they didn't have vibranium, it would have been too heavy, your clavicle would have snapped. So they anchored it to your-? Shit. That's barbaric. I mean, literally barbaric. Rome was sacked by Visigoths with prosthetics made of stone and mastodon hide attached to their spines. No, that's not true. I just made it up, but it sounds like it could be true and that's the goddamn point, isn't it?"

Barnes' breathing was studiously silent, but Tony could see from his readings that it was labored. The guy must know how to wheeze without making a sound (all the better to sneak up and murder people).

"It's no more than you deserve," said Tony. "We've got good vets in this country, men and women who served with honor and never laid a finger on a civilian, who don't have good prosthetics yet. They have to be individualized. I'm not about to bump you to the head of the line just because you're friends with-" The full scan appeared on Tony's readout and he stopped, stunned into momentary silence. "It's not just attached to your spine, it's impinging on it. It's malfunctioning, sending signals along the dorsal nerve root that...no wonder you can't talk! It's a miracle you can fucking stand."

Tony sat down on wheeled stool, resting his elbow on his leg and his temples on his hand. He was no doctor (although he did have multiple doctorates, a fact which he wished more people would remember). He wasn't a medical doctor. He couldn't even remember the difference between aspirin and acetaminophen most days. But after Rhodey's injury, he'd made it his business to learn everything he could about the human spinal column, which is how he knew that the nerve bundles entering closest to the back carried sensory information to the brain, while those closer to the chest carried motor information to the body. The back bundles, the dorsal bundles, could carry any bodily sensation from below the neck: no visual or auditory information, but heat, pressure, friction, even internal experiences like a full bladder. And, of course, pain. Direct stimulation via electricity or pressure nearly always produced agonizing pain, or - at best - a sort of pins-and-needles-on-steroids feeling called 'parasthesia' that, Tony assumed, was also horrible.

Barnes' arm had six anchor points along his spine. One, attached to the cervical vertebrae, was in good condition. Three more were failing, tilted off at odd angles that caused compression and tension. The final two, both in the lumbar region, were completely wrecked. He must've taken a blow in combat because they had inverted, jamming screws directly into his sensory neurons.

"Hey, Mr. Creepface," said Tony. It wasn't his finest insult, but there was no one around to appreciate it anyway. "Can you take painkillers? Do they work on you? Sedatives? Anesthetic?" Tony wasn't entirely clear on the degree to which Barnes had supersoldier traits.

Predictably, Barnes didn't answer. It was probably only his decades of training (brainwashing), Tony realized, that kept him on his feet instead of curled up in a ball screaming.

"There has to be a way to knock you out," muttered Tony. "They put it in, didn't they?" He looked up at Barnes and exhaled mightily, as if all this were an annoying chore, rather than a vexing moral conundrum. "I'm not going to do it, mind you. I'm not fixing that arm. But I'll give you a workup on it. See if I can figure out the proper dose of horse tranquilizers needed to get in there while I'm at it. And then you leave, got it?"

James Rhodes carefully lowered himself into the chair in front of Tony's high res computer screen. He could nearly always do this without falling now, but it required concentration. He couldn't rely on his legs to reflexively, actively support his weight at any angle other than perpendicular to a flat ground.

Tony didn't actually acknowledge his friend's presence, just kept scrolling through PDFs and images.

"What are we looking at?" asked Rhodes, once he was settled in the chair. He allowed his eyes to focus on the screen in front of him. "Holy...where did you get all this?"

"Places," said Tony.

"You got records on the Winter Soldier's brainwashing from places?" Rhodes was getting pissed. He was a decorated officer and he did not have time for this shit.

"He's in the secondary lab down the hall," said Tony, as though this actually explained where he got the files.

"Who is?"

"Winter Soldier. Barnes. Whatever," Tony waved his hand indifferently. "Vision's with him."

Rhodes took the tone that he pretty much always felt the need to take with Tony: exasperated, faintly angry disbelief. "The Winter Soldier is in your house and you didn't feel the need to lead with that? Is he under arrest? Did you capture him? Why is-"

Tony made incoherent 'stop your silly questions' noises and spun around 180 degrees. Of course, Rhodes was sitting next to him, so he had to course correct and spin back to look his friend in the eye. "I'm going to operate on him," said Tony, clapping his hands together once with eager finality.

"There are so many things wrong with that sentence, I don't even know where to begin." Rhodes wondered if there was a chance he was asleep, then rejected the idea on the grounds that his subconscious was not dumb enough to think up this plot. "Let's start with the fact you're not a surgeon."

"He doesn't need a surgeon. He need a mechanic. And I'm brilliant at that."

"You're going to fix his arm? Why would you do that?"

Tony ignored his friend's question in favor of the one he felt like answering. "You might be wondering how we're going to knock him out for the procedure." (Rhodes actually hadn't wondered that because he had assumed that the arm would just be removed, fixed, and reattached.) "Remember how Rogers can't get drunk? It's not just his paragon-ish patriotic virtue, it's a super-charged liver. Barnes has the same thing, but not exactly the same. He needs more anesthesia than a regular guy, but we don't know how much more. Vision's running tests on him right now."

"And the HYDRA records?"

"I was trying to find out how they anesthetized him."

"And?"

There was finally a pause in Tony's patter. "They didn't. Too much anesthesia will kill anyone, but a partial paralytic...well, as long as you've got a respirator and a pacemaker, you won't die."

"A paralytic? But he'd be awake."

"Yeah." Tony sounded vacant, like he wasn't entirely present in his own words. "They did try a few other things. Ketamine made him go nuts, killed a couple of nurses. Later on they just used topical anesthetic and punished him for moving." Tony looked back at the screen. "Play July 19, 1972."

"I don't know if I want to see this," said Rhodes, but he didn't look away.

A nude man lay face down on a gurney, his metal arm supported on a solid steel table of the same height. His skin was so pale it was past white and into blue, covered in sweat and streaked with iodine. The man's face was pointed directly downward and so was not visible. There were nurses and guards. One guard held a stick, eighteen inches long and three-quarters inch in diameter. A surgeon was working on Barnes' left shoulder. The camera wasn't zoomed in enough to provide a clear view of the operation, but every few minutes, Barnes would stir with the tiniest of movements. At first, Rhodes couldn't even see what was triggering the punishment, but eventually he noticed a twitch in Barnes' fingers or a tensing in his calves. At each of these actions, minimal though they were, the guard jabbed Barnes with the stick. There was obviously electricity running through it, based on the way it made Barnes' hair move. Not to mention the fine pink and red burns it left behind.

"Picana," said Rhodes. "What he's using, it's called a picana. And if it's leaving marks like that, there's no way he could just lay there. He should be screaming."

Tony didn't visibly react to this information, but Rhodes knew he was taking it in. "This part," said Tony, "I don't get."

The surgeon asked a nurse for a tool; it was passed. Barnes whimpered. That was apparently against the rules because the guard with the picana jammed it in Barnes' anus.

Rhodes gasped at that, in involuntary, sympathetic pain. He rolled his eyes upward to give himself a respite from watching what was on the screen.

Tony paused the recording, an act which thankfully hid the image from view. "See, I don't get that."

"What don't you get? They're torturing him, Tony."

"No, they're repairing him. For fucked up, torturous reasons, yes, but they call him Asset. He's useful to them. Why would they-?" Tony twitched and changed tactics. "There aren't nearly as many nerve endings in the rectum as on the hands, the face, the soles of the feet. It would hurt more on one of those. So why stick the damn thing up his ass?"

"Sexual assault as a form of torture is-"

"Yeah, I know. I read the same textbook. Supposed to be worse than physical assault. But why would it be worse? Because there's shame, violation, humiliation. He can't feel any of that. They beat it out of him decades before." Tony pointed to the list of files. "I've seen them catheterize him, debride a burn on his scrotum, masturbate him to collect semen samples for god knows what purpose." Tony twitched again. The purpose was obvious. Please god don't let Barnes have children. "And he never reacted once, not after 1955 or so. He didn't feel violated because in his mind there's nothing to violate."

"Tony," said Rhodes gently, "how many of these videos have you watched?"

"I don't know. What time is it?"

Rhodes looked at the list of files on the screen. There were hundreds, maybe thousands. "Why are you watching these?"

"I told you, to figure out how to operate on him, fix his arm."

Rhodes crossed his arms. "You also told me that HYDRA didn't have any good methods of sedating him and that Vision's working out the anesthesia protocol right now."

Tony massaged both of his temples and sighed, long and low. "It took me a while to figure that out, that they had nothing," he said, sounding almost defeated. And then, "He killed my parents, Rhodey. If I'm going to help him…How can I justify helping him if I think he had any, any choice at all in the matter?"

They were both quiet after that.

Finally, Rhodes put his hand on Tony's shoulder. "You remember what I said to you after Afghanistan?"

"You said a lot of things."

"I said that I thought the military does cadets a disservice by making them think they can resist a thorough interrogation. And it was true. You hadn't told me what they did to you yet, but they had you for so long, I thought maybe you had given something up and I didn't want you blaming yourself for that."

They made eye contact. Rhodes thought that Tony got the message. If Tony wasn't to blame for giving in to the Ten Rings, then Barnes could hardly be blamed for submitting to Hydra, and Tony could help him without guilt. Rhodes had attended Howard and Maria's funerals. He had done his damnedest to keep a self-destructing Tony from going completely off the rails in the months that followed. If Tony had just told Barnes to fuck off, Rhodes would have understood. But if Tony wanted to do the surgery, well, then Rhodes would see to it that he had just plenty of proof that Barnes was brainwashed, enough that he wouldn't feel like he was betraying his parents' memory, but no more than that. More than that was just Tony tormenting himself and triggering his own PTSD.

"Now," said Rhodes, "I've got two questions: Why am I here, and why isn't Rogers?"

"You're here because he's already out of his mind with pain and we're going to anesthetize him and who knows how that'll work. I need you to put on the suit and keep him in line if he comes out of surgery all fucked up and murderous." Tony shrugged. "And, you know, moral support." He mumbled the last two words.

"And Rogers?"

"Besides the fact he's a fugitive?"

Rhodes just waited. Tony obeyed the laws that suited him.

"Because he doesn't need to see this shit, okay? He was finally starting to get along with the future when this guy comes back and you know it's killing him just imagining what it was like, just reading about it. You think seeing it isn't going to completely fuck him up?"

"I don't know about that. I know I watched the video the Ten Rings released of you...I don't know, at least a hundred times. I also know that if Barnes wakes up from surgery semi-conscious and crazy, it's Rogers who will have the best chance of calming him down."

"I know."

"You know?"

"I called him half an hour ago. He was all ready to cash in political favors and walk in the front door, but I talked him down to hopping shipping containers and sneaking around. It's slower but safer. He balked, but I pointed out that Barnes picked me, not the other way around."

Rhodes nodded slowly. "When's the last time you had a drink, Tony?"

Tony looked at his watch. "About four hours ago. Vision's going to notify me when he's eight hours out from being ready for surgery. I'll have one drink then, to make sure I don't get the shakes when it's time. Don't worry, I'm not going to get wasted before opening up this guy's back."

Rhodes had a lot to say about the fact that Tony was worried about getting the shakes after twelve hours without alcohol, but it could wait.