Chapter Text
They all have private names.
He stopped being Bucky when he was sold off by his mother to pay the rent. The one thing she did for him, the one useful thing, was to neglect to put his middle name on the bill of sale. She’d never liked it, anyway - his father had chosen it, and that was reason enough for her to hate it - and to her, he’d always been James.
So no owner ever saw the ‘Buchanan’ in his name, never thought to give him the nickname Bucky, and as a result it was just his, the only thing he owned, a playground name he could hold close to his chest like a jewel and only give away to people who earned it. He’s been Jamie since he first got bought, a name he now answers to as naturally as breathing, but inside he’s still Bucky.
Desiree is Desi to him, a gorgeous fifteen-year-old he adopted as soon as she came through the door. Her father sold them both into slavery to prevent them from starving, and Bucky has to wonder just how ridiculously naive the man must have been. This is her first establishment, and it shows - she’s shy, nervous, totally out of place. They get a young one every so often (Bucky’s twenty-two, but much, much older) and the ones who’ve been around for longer take turns looking after them.
‘How old were you, when…?’ she’d asked him on her first night, and he’d grinned.
‘Never ask that question, doll,’ he told her gently. ‘Nobody likes hearing it, and nobody likes saying it.’
‘Oh.’ She’d looked crestfallen, upset at asking the wrong question, and Jamie had taken her hand.
‘You ever done it before?’ he asked, voice soft, and she’d blushed crimson against her caramel skin, eyes squeezed shut in embarrassment as she shook her head. Bucky nodded. ‘Do they know that?’
A pause, and she’d nodded. It broke Bucky’s heart.
‘Why?’ she asked.
Jamie looked at her for a long moment before deciding he had nothing to lose by telling the truth. ‘If they didn’t know you were a virgin, I’d have found someone for you.’ He shrugs. ‘Someone to make it good.’
A quick glance from dark eyes. ‘Not you?’
He’d grinned. ‘Not me, doll. Women aren’t my forte.’
He’d passed her off to one of the other girls, who gave her some tips, taught her how to use the numbing cream all the women use to make themselves a bit more comfortable.
Now they’re on shift, and it’s been three hours since he saw her last, and he ambles over to the concierge desk with his heart in his throat. He’s hiding a limp from the night before, and it’s a little hard for him to draw breath with the bruise that guest left on his ribs, but he still manages a shit-eating grin. ‘Hey, Cora.’
She’s wearing a slinky dress, holding a StarkPad in her hand. Her eyes flick over to him as he approaches. ‘Jamie.’
Of all the ‘assets’ (Pierce’s preferred term to describe the slaves) in the place, Bucky has the most complicated relationship with the paid staff. He’s the boss’s favourite - as far as they’re concerned, he’s ready to report on them for the smallest mistake. He’s possibly the most experienced person here, which also irritates them: he has a sixth sense for trouble, always knows when someone should be refused entry.
The guards, he doesn’t have a problem with - they’re happy to have another pair of eyes, someone who can warn them of impending trouble. But it’s a concierge’s job to match a guest with an asset, and they hate the fact that Bucky pokes his nose into their business.
So he just gives Cora a sunny grin, leaning over the desk. ‘Where did you put Desiree?’ he asks, and the woman narrows her eyes before consulting the tablet in her hand.
‘Room 405,’ she says after a moment. ‘Two guests were with her - they left a half-hour ago.’
‘Two?’ Bucky asks, frowning. ‘Did you know that this is her first time?’
Cora nods, looking bored, and Bucky wants to pull her hair, slap the expression from her face. ‘They paid,’ she tells him, and Bucky balls his hands into fists.
‘She’s fifteen.’ It comes out flat and hard. Cora just looks at him as if he’s a moron.
‘Like I said,’ she replies, speaking slowly. ‘They paid a lot.’
So she knew. They wanted a first-timer, they wanted someone underage, and they were in luck. ‘Fuck you,’ Bucky pushes himself away from the desk before he does something he’ll regret. ‘It was her first time, Cora! Don’t you have any...’ he strains for a word, ‘...decency? Humanity? The kid’s fucking terrified.’
She doesn’t say anything to that, just looks at him, and Bucky has to turn and walk away before he does something really stupid.
-
Pierce hires cleaners to come in once a week and make sure everything is spotless, but the slaves do everything else. They clean the rooms, do the laundry, cook their own large group meals, and make sure the place runs smoothly before being on shift every weeknight at 6pm, and every Saturday at 12pm.
Bucky cleans and cooks with the rest of them, but he’s also at Pierce’s beck and call. Their owner conducts his business in the bar during the day, and Bucky has to be available at all times, just happening to walk past when Pierce is by himself, or dropping in to charm a business contact when Rumlow needs to distract them. Ideally he appears before he’s even sent for.
The others cover for him, tell him who’s arrived, do his chores so that he can keep Pierce sweet.
This is his fifth place since the age of six. Three years of long shifts followed by nights spent in Pierce’s bed, the threat of violence always around the corner. He never sleeps when he stays in the boss’s room. He’s the last into the dorm every night, and the first up in the morning. He hasn’t slept a full seven-hour stretch since be became the favourite.
He’s worried it’s beginning to show in his temper.
-
‘Captain!’ Bucky greets the newest security guard with a cheerful grin, trying to ignore the shadow that passes over the older man’s face as he sees him. Jake (and somehow it’s almost nice that this cop has a private name as well, Jake Robins obviously can’t be his real one) has been avoiding him studiously for the two weeks since he joined, presumably terrified that Bucky will ‘out’ him to the staff.
‘Oh, uh...’
When you’re a slave, looks are all that matter - by now, Bucky has a connoisseur's eye, and he has to admit that this guy is damn near perfect. He even manages to look adorable when flustered, and Bucky reaches up a hand to stop him from walking away.
‘I need a favour,’ he says softly, steering Jake towards the elevator. ‘Trade you for it.’
Jake frowns. ‘Trade?’
Bucky rolls his eyes. In his lexicon, ‘trade’ only means one thing, and as they wait for the elevator to arrive, his hand slides down from Jake’s shoulder so that he can swipe a finger under the waistband of his pants. ‘Oh,’ Jake says softly. ‘You don’t need to - ’
The elevator opens and they step in. ‘Don’t be naive,’ Bucky tells him. Nothing comes for free.
The set of Jake’s mouth implies that he isn’t happy, but he doesn’t press. ‘What do you need?’ he asks, as Bucky presses the button for level four and the doors slide closed.
‘I’m worried about one of the girls.’ The elevator starts to move. ‘You can open doors - I can’t.’
-
She’s lying on the floor - from her position, Bucky thinks he was trying to reach the bathroom when she passed out.
‘Desiree?’ He drops to his knees beside her and realises Jake’s done the same, is checking her breathing and airways and all that shit. ‘She’s breathing,’ the cop says tightly, and Bucky didn’t realise he’d been holding his own breath until he hears the words.
‘They must have given her something.’ He closes his eyes for a moment, thinking sorry, sorry, sorry to Desi’s prone form, before he lifts her skirt.
Blood. Bruises are already coming up on her thighs, and it looks like the pair of johns took both entrances. He wants to be sick, wants to scream and punch something - but instead he just lowers her skirt carefully, smoothing it down, and looks up at Jake with what he knows must be hollow eyes. ‘We need to get her to the nurse,’ he says, and Jake - bless him - asks no questions, just picks Desiree up in his arms and gets to his feet.
Bucky keeps one hand on her as they walk, twisting one of her tiny braids in his fingers. ‘Jamie,’ the cop asks him after a few minutes of silence, wending their way through utility corridors as they head down to the basement. ‘Are you - ’
‘She’s fifteen. It’s her first time. There were two guys.’ If he says anything more, he’s going to cry - his voice is hoarse. He glances up at Jake, meets his eyes, and wishes he could say it: You better burn this place to the ground. Because maybe his first master was worse, the smiling monster with a penchant for six-year-olds, but he was just one man - this building takes a hundred clients a night, and somehow Bucky views the concierge’s cold complicity as worse than one man’s fantasies.
Jake is silent for the rest of the journey, and they leave Desi on one of the beds in the nurse’s room, a place most of the people here are intimately familiar with. The nurse is a slave herself, older and wearier than the rest of them are, and Bucky knows her expression matches his when she sees what he’s brought for her. He feels numb, drained.
The cop leaves the room during Bucky’s explanation, but he’s waiting outside when Bucky emerges, and allows himself to be drawn into the disabled toilet next door. ‘Jamie, are you OK?’ he asks, reaching up a hand, but Bucky shrugs him off - he doesn’t do sympathy, least of all from people who aren’t slaves.
‘Thanks for helping,’ Bucky says. For a moment he thinks he’s forgotten how to smile, but then he remembers, and offers Jake a lascivious grin. ‘I owe you, remember?’ he tells the older man, but there’s something in Jake’s expression that makes him wonder if his smile is broken.
‘Jamie - ’
‘C’mon,’ he’s warming up now, pushing Desi out of his mind, and he behaves as he would for Pierce, slipping the taunting brattiness on like a coat as he smirks. ‘They won’t take it out of your pay if it’s our secret.’
Our secret, his second master whispers in his mind, and sometimes Bucky thinks he’s going insane.
‘No, really - ’ Jake shakes his head, but Bucky’s never been refused yet.
‘What do you want?’ he asks, soft and low. ‘I could suck you off again,’ he offers, and the older man makes a small noise in the back of his throat. He reaches for Jake’s belt, but then the older man’s hands are on his, stilling them. Bucky looks up in irritation: ‘What do you want?’
There’s a pause, Jake’s blue eyes boring into his, and then the cop finally says: ‘Your name.’
‘What?’
‘Your last name.’
Bucky frowns at him, pulls his hands out of Jake’s grip. ‘Why?’
Jake shrugs. ‘I don’t want - that.’ He’s blushing. ‘I’d like to know more about you.’
This is dangerous. Bucky can feel it, the same way he always knows when a fight’s going to break out. But he can’t see any way out of it, so he looks away. ‘Barnes,’ he murmurs, and walks out the door before he can give any more of himself away.
-
There are slaves of all ages from 15 to 40, of all races - ‘Something for everyone,’ as Rumlow likes to say - and none of them last more than four years before Pierce ‘refreshes the workforce’ by replacing them.
Three years and counting. Bucky knows he’s living on borrowed time.
-
That night, Pierce fucks him so hard he thinks he’s ruptured something, presses a knife against the back of his neck as Bucky sucks him off, and pulls on his collar until he passes out.
Still smelling of his master’s bed, he breaks into the medical room and pushes one of the other beds up against Desi’s. He crawls in next to her, the way Reggie did for him all those years ago, and takes one of her hands in his.
When she wakes up in the morning, she rolls over, buries her face in his shoulder, and cries.