Chapter Text
—Underground HYDRA-run KGB facility, Kursk Oblast, December 1957—
The upper railings are all strung with garland.
He can see it from the pit, which is what they call his prep room in the Kursk base.
It’s a little tacky, calling his prep room “the pit.” Maybe even a bit mean-spirited, but that’s HYDRA for you. Fuckers. They had a lot of mottos, most of them stupid, but none of those mottos were “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.” Still, he’s got to admit that “the pit” is about as accurate as anything else would be, and probably more so.
He imagines it as the people might see it, looking down from the brightly lit concentric landings outside their offices and housing areas into the shadowy sub level deep in the middle of their concrete base, with the metal railings and safety bars, the chair, the tiled nook with the drains in the floor, the metal tables and flashing monitors, the metal bench bolted into the wall behind the bar-lined door with the squealing hinges, the curve of the cryochamber with its perpetually obscured glass—either fog and condensation or creeping ice crystals.
What else would they call a big, roughly circular hole even deeper underground than the rest of the base, lit by flickering fluorescent bulbs and housing an occasionally screaming and increasingly dead-eyed automaton? How could anyone refer to this place, so complete with all the tools needed for the care and upkeep of codename Winter Soldier, as anything other than “the pit?”
They could call it the prep room, he supposes bitterly, the way every other support team in every other base does. Common fucking courtesy. Every base has a prep room, after all, and most of them have all the same things stashed inside that prep room. Or maybe it’s just every base he’s been stored in. Sometimes he loses track of the facts that surround him. This is just one instance of many.
It would bother him, forgetting things, but his forgetfulness pleases the General, and sometimes he is rewarded for a particularly empty stretch of thought.
But the garland.
He can look up from his chair, when they let him sit in it, and see the garland beyond the halo, looping along the railings all the way up past his sight lines. He wouldn’t be surprised to learn that green fuzzy shit went all the way to the top. He would be surprised if he ever saw the top, even in his chair, which is very nearly but not quite in the dead center of the pit.
The support team in this base seems to be uncomfortable with his chair. He has no idea why, since none of them ever get put into it, or strapped down against it, or electrocuted by the halo above it. But for whatever reason, they only let him sit in his chair while they prepare the halo for a wipe, or while he’s receiving maintenance to the Arm. Or during their prep for another round of cryofreeze testing.
It’s been a while, or at least he thinks it has, since he was last allowed to simply rest in his chair. They don’t even let him sit in it for biochemical maintenance. He has to sit on the bench behind the bars while all the IVs empty their bags of mystery chemicals into his right arm. Enzymes, something called amino acids. Calories. They don’t lock him down and snake tubes into his nose and down his throat like some of the other support teams. If he were an idiot, he’d suppose this was a kindness on their part. But he’s not. They need his stomach empty because they put him in the cold several times a week here.
He wishes, when he allows himself to do so, that they would let him sit in his chair for the IV feedings, even if they didn’t let him sit there just to sit. The other support teams at the other bases let him. It’s his chair, after all. In the other bases, it’s where he belongs when he’s not specifically ordered to be somewhere else, doing something else. It’s a very comfortable chair, when the restraints are harmlessly open and the halo is raised up high and silent. It’s relaxing. Safe. Way better than the cryochamber and the cold, and with an excellent view of the garland that he both hates and adores in equal, alternating measures.
It’s not as though the chair is the only point in the pit to observe that garland from, though. He can still see the garland from inside the cryochamber, for instance. Can look out from the smudgy glass wall during testing and make out the faint green splodges of the garland just at the top of his field of vision, just for a moment before the cold really hits him and everything is a muffled, silent oblivion.
From what he can put together of the last few weeks—he thinks it’s only been few weeks—the support team in this base has been tasked with improving the cryofreeze process. Their improvements so far seem to consist of adding and subtracting aerosolized chemicals, jamming a breathing tube down his throat, and increasing the number of Tesseract-blue monitoring devices studding the cryosuit he has to wear at all times—because it would just be so damn inconvenient if they had to change his outfit before tossing him in the fucking freezer.
He’s not been enjoying it, which is hardly a discovery in any sense of that word. His lack of enthusiasm is not something the support team gives a flying fuck about, which is also not a discovery. He hates this base and this support team, and no amount of garland is going to fix that. He’s been frozen more times in the last however long than in the whole prior year… he thinks. It’s hard to be certain. His memory is shit at the best of times, and the cold-thaw-cold-thaw-cold doesn’t help things. It’s hard to keep track of anything when he’s in and out of the cold so often.
The garland is a constant, though. It jogs his memory whenever he comes back out of the cold, fills him in on the current sitrep—which base (fuck, the Kursk base), which team (the goddamn HYDRA team), what they’re putting him through this time (so fucking cold), what’s expected of him in return (…he tends to draw a blank on this; there’s only so much the garland can help with—it’s just garland, after all, for all that he has an arrangement with some of the garland’s inhabitants).
Mostly, what seems to be expected of him in this base is that he stays in the pit unless they direct him to the training course, where he will run endurance tests until he passes out from a variety of cryofreeze-related causes. Or unless they direct him to the medical room, where he’ll lie back on the table and be as still as he can be while they perform whatever repairs are needed after failing the endurance trials and before they can stuff him back in the fucking cryochamber.
For everything else, the pit suffices.
There’s his chair and the halo, so that they can erase memories he shouldn’t have, and put new thoughts in his head that they want him to have, and lock up his limbs for any Arm repairs. Check. There’s a table where any mission briefings will be presented to him if they ever send him on another mission, which is starting to seem like never again, but still, it’s a check.
There’s the cryochamber, source of his current misery. Double fucking check.
There’s the tile-lined niche in the wall, with the hoses for cleaning him and the chains for punishing him. Check. There’s the other little niche with the bench behind the barred door, where they feed him through the IVs and where they want him to stay whenever they are upstairs doing the things people do, which seems to increasingly consist of singing and passing around little gifts and bottles of vodka. Check, check, check.
He spends most of his time, at least most of the time he’s aware of his surroundings, behind the barred door. If the support team in this base is uncomfortable with his chair, they’re even more uncomfortable with the thought of him moving around freely inside the pit, especially at night. As though his moving around in the pit was going to undo their work. As if he would sabotage their progress. As if he would hurt himself. That last is frankly ridiculous. He’s long since given up on suicide. It doesn’t work. The General showed him, very, very explicitly, and for a very, very long time, that it did not work.
He learned.
The General is a very patient, thorough instructor. The General knows how to get through to him, how to inspire him, how to keep him at peak performance even through a monthlong sabbatical from missions.
The General would not quarantine him to a little indentation in the wall of the pit. This support team, though, they want him to stay here. Exactly here. They want him to lie down on the metal bench and be still until they are ready to send him back into the cold, followed by the training course and the medical table and the chair, and then back to the bench behind the bars. They do not want him to sleep on the bench, and so he doesn’t. But they do expect to come down into the pit and find him exactly where they left him.
They haven’t told him so—he thinks he’d remember if they did; he’s good at remembering direct orders, or at least better at remembering them. He’s close to certain they haven’t commanded him to stay in the corner, or even in the pit itself, but he’s just as sure they want him to. And an unspoken order is still something to comply with, technically. It’s still something he can be punished for not complying with, which, when you boil it down, is reason enough to go ahead and try to comply. Somewhat.
Staying behind the bars in the little indentation with the bench doesn’t actually hinder his view of the garland, anyway. He can look out between the bars, even while curled up beneath the bench (less exposed that way, and the hint of defiance in the action tastes good to him), and catch the swoops of color that do not belong alongside the concrete and metal and fluorescent lights, and that he sometimes loves, and sometimes hates a lot.
The garland is distracting. Even if this support team had assigned him mental conditioning challenges to take up the long stretches of downtime, the garland would still pull at him. It keeps jumping into his mind, crowding up toward the front, every time his eyes come across it, even if it’s just as a flicker of green in the corner of his sight. And it’s practically unavoidable—a splash of color where there should not be color.
And there are glittering things tucked away in the garland, sometimes in a cluster (like the support team, always moving about the base in twos and threes and fours) and sometimes all on their own (like him). Some of the things are balls, either made of metal or painted in metallic colors. He’s not permitted close enough to be certain. Some of the things are little birds. Red ones, gold ones, silver ones… Some of the things are ribbons, red satin. He doesn’t know for sure that they are satin. But something in his mind suggests it—either satin or velvet—and he has no reason to suppose otherwise.
Eventually, he gives up trying to ignore the garland. It’s everywhere, after all. If they didn’t want him looking at it, they wouldn’t hang it up. Unless it’s a test. All of the support teams at all of the bases, even the ones that haven’t been infiltrated by HYDRA yet, are sadistically fond of such tests. And he fails a lot of them. But if it’s a test and he’s failing it, no one has yet chastised him for the failure.
Once, in a reckless attempt to discover whether it is a test, he looks directly, almost defiantly, at the garland when he’s been given nothing more practical to direct his attention toward. No one even glances in his direction. He feels… maybe a little lightheaded, maybe a little… “Stir crazy” is what one of the support team had called it, when the outlook for the future is boredom with a side of boredom. Something about fevers and cabins that had not made sense then and still doesn’t, exactly, except that it’s supposed to be a description of the same feeling.
He needs a mission so bad.
It’s not even that he looks forward to killing anyone. He doesn’t. He’d rather not, if given a choice. But he’s got to do something. Something besides sit on this fucking bench and wait for the support team to… he doesn’t know. Go through the routine again, maybe. Cold-thaw, cold-thaw. They should just leave him in the cold if they aren’t going to get on with it.
Seriously—not even a fucking logic puzzle to worry at while they run their calculations and mutter about chemical formulas and muscle strain and tissue regeneration. Not even a goddamn rifle to take apart and clean and reassemble on loop for hours. Not even the training course for endless unsupervised laps. It serves them right if he loses his mind in the fronds of garland all day long. What else do they expect? Fucking HYDRA. The General knows better. The General keeps his mind sharp and ready to comply.
The General is not here.
He decides one day, after a perfunctory wipe that merely smooths things over, and does not make the last few weeks go away, that the birds are the most interesting of the objects tucked into the greenery. They nest in the garland and shine and glitter in the flickering, buzzing fluorescent lights. Not at all like real birds, though he can’t quite recall when he last had an opportunity to stare incessantly at any actual, non-garland-haunting birds. He wants…
—No. He doesn’t want. Has learned not to want. Wanting is a human thing, a thing he has forgotten, a thing the General has helped him to forget, allowed him to forget…
But he is curious, increasingly driven to touch them. Just once. Just to run a finger along one of the birds’ heads. Just to see what they feel like, what they’re made of. Are they smooth, like the fingertips on his metal hand? Are they rough, like the calluses on his flesh hand?
He could go up the stairs to be closer to the garland with the birds. There’s no barricade in place to stop him at the moment. And since they’re all so bizarrely afraid of his chair, they don’t strap him down to it at night, like some of the other bases’ support teams do. He’s physically free to move about the pit, and also outside of it.
It’s just that the upper levels are for personnel, for the support team, for base staff, for officers and their occasionally visiting families. For the arborists who manage the forested area around the base so that it remains undetected, and the structural engineers who ensure that the base will remain as upright as a base drilled deep into the earth can be said to be.
The upper levels are not for him. He belongs down here in the pit, not up there near the garland with the birds. Even more, he belongs in one specific part of the pit, behind the bars, even though the barred door isn’t locked to keep him in—and wouldn’t keep him in if it were welded shut, simply because the Arm is much stronger than a few piddly bars.
Even without going up the stairs where he doesn’t belong, though, he could get a closer look at the birds through a rifle scope. The armory is down the hall just through the door directly across from the cryochamber, and he’s never been denied access to an armory that he can remember, at least at other bases. Other support teams have only ever encouraged him to frolic in the ordinance, to repetitively assemble and disassemble every piece of every item, to learn the other weapons as inside and out as he knows himself. Better than, actually. They don’t want him knowing much about the Arm.
But he can imagine the panic that would descend upon this base if anyone looked down and saw him looking back from the pit through a rifle scope, even if he didn’t still have it attached to its rifle. His job is to kill the people he’s directed to kill, not to terrify the people who own him.
There is a very small part of him that thinks it would be hilarious and fitting for every HYDRA fucker on this base to shit themselves in a blind panic over something as simple as him getting a good look at one of those fucking, fucking garland birds that torment him by sparkling so brightly. All the other parts of him scream and gibber about the repercussions of that, the cognitive recalibration they would put him through, the behavioral modification, the maintenance to repair his programming, which would have to have fallen apart for him to do that…
…The General’s severe disappointment with him…
He licks his suddenly dry lips. No. The rifle scope is not an option. He will do nothing that could draw the General’s disappointment.
And so he spends endless empty minutes each day between trips into and out of the cold, when none of the support team are paying him any attention beyond lamenting the state of his throat, looking at the garland two and more stories above him, with the metallic spheres, the glittering birds, the satin—velvet?—bows. And he spends long, silent hours each night, when none of the support team are even awake, lying under the metal bench behind the bars, thinking about what it would be like to touch one of the birds. His fingers itch with it, metal and flesh both, the thought of touching a glittering bird…
He wonders if he fell off this same train of thought the last time he was stored in this base over the winter—seven years ago, if he’s overheard the chatter correctly. To him, the garland is new; the metal balls, new; the birds, new. He thinks the ribbons—satin? velvet?—might be familiar, may be repurposed from something else, could be not-new. He doesn’t remember seeing them before, but they have that look about them. Who is he to say whether they are new or not-new? He doesn’t pretend to be the best judge of whether something has happened before.
He supposes, after another week of sleepless contemplation while the support team fine-tunes their latest improvement to the cryofreeze process, that he could touch one of the birds, after all, and fuck it if the support team panics.
He knows that he’s supposed to stay in the pit, that the little barred nook with the bench is where he belongs overnight in this base, staring into the darkness and listening to all the little night sounds and waiting for his throat to heal, or for them to take him out and send him through the training course, or strap him to the table, or put him into the cold again, or maybe (hopefully) prep him for a mission.
He should stay in the pit… But no one specifically directed him to do that. There were no orders. No one gave the command, no one called him by his designation and laid down the directive and asked him if he would comply. He would remember. He’s sure he would remember. He knows he would remember.
So he wouldn’t be breaking any rules if he were to climb up in the night and touch one of the glittering birds. A red one, he thinks, as his empty stomach flutters like he’s disobeying a direct order from the General himself, even though he’s doing no such thing. I would touch one of the red birds.
He closes his eyes and trembles with the sudden wash of fear and anticipation as he imagines climbing the stairs, walking up them almost like a person might, and reaching out…
Which hand? Which hand would he use to touch the bird? The metal hand would tell him so much about the bird. The precise temperature, whether there was an electrical component, maybe even the composition, the materials used to create the bird. And it would leave no evidence behind. But the flesh hand… To touch a glittering bird with the flesh hand, to run a flesh finger along the bird’s head, to rest a flesh fingertip at the point of its beak and feel how sharp…
He opens his eyes with a gasp, controls his shaky breathing, swallows against the ache in his throat. It’s night. It’s unlikely anyone from the support team would be watching him. They’re all asleep. He’s in the cryosuit, of course he is, but there are no monitors tucked inside it, nothing resting against his skin or inside his skull to alert them to his agitation.
But it is important to maintain baseline functioning when possible. It would be unpleasant if they noticed his elevated heart rate, investigated, asked him what was on his mind… and then took the thoughts of the glittering birds away from him. They’d use the halo, because that’s what they’re equipped with. A general wipe, precursory, maintenance only. Nothing specific, nothing deep. But at this point, the fucking birds might as well be the only thoughts he has left. They’d have to go deep to get the birds out. And deep means…
It means…
No. No. Avoid that thought. Move on.
Better to return himself to baseline than be returned to it by the— By the— By—
He doesn’t think about the excavation team, or the gaping, jagged, empty places inside himself, or the special machines, unspeakably worse than the halo, that are used to carve those empty places out. Not in any specific sense; at the best of times, his mind shies away from them like a record skipping over to a new track whenever he gets too close to those thoughts.
Other times, he’s like a stone on top of a lake, thrown just right, scraping the surface of that emptiness and the men and women who carve it out, skipping over the top until plunk, down he sinks into it and loses time, sometimes whole days, before someone comes and lifts him back out.
They are not housed in this base, he knows. Not the… the team. Not their machines. And he is safe here, as long as no one suspects there’s a need for anything more thorough than the halo.
But he could be transferred.
Or they could be transferred.
Could come and— and—
Skip.
Skip skip skip.
Plunk.