Chapter Text
The moment he could feel his fingers begin to tingle and hear his own thoughts begin to surface from the frozen cold sleep he had been placed in, he knew he was being woken. With his body frozen through, he could only be still. There was nothing he could do to express the panic that boiled up in him. It came from somewhere deep inside, somewhere primal, from a place within him that wanted nothing but to fight his way out of wherever he was.
His body was restricted, not only because he was frozen to the bone. He could feel the pull of his bonds keeping him in place when he tried to tug his slowly thawing arm free.
He could hear voices from outside of the tube he had been kept in. For how long, he was unsure.
It all felt like a dream. Like he was floating somewhere outside of space and time. All the while every inch of his skin burned as the cells came back to life.
If he could remember the past times he had experienced this, he would have known that waking up again was always like a painful dream.
Nothing excised outside of him and the cryostasis chamber and his thoughts were racing but empty of content.
He didn’t exist. He wasn’t a person. He was what they made him into.
He was their winter soldier.