Chapter Text
"There resides infinitely more good in the demonic than in the trivial man."
— Kierkegaard
Away from the world and beyond the scrutiny of common knowledge, secreted away into a methodically manufactured nothingness, in a damp room in a concrete fortress, a flock of doctors busied around the returned Soldier — The Asset. Or, today, the Problem.
As they performed the standard tests and checks and tinkered at the dents in his mechanical arm, he sat quietly, personless. Underneath all that, he was expecting another "corrective calibration", another session where everything hurt until it went blank. His whole body was expecting it, tight with muscle-memory that ran deeper than his own with horrors he no longer had access to.
He had almost failed his mission, he completed it by dumb luck alone. He knew it, and his handlers knew it. What was left of his ego had bitterly learned long ago that his successes were due to the brilliant doctors, but the failures were his own.
Nevertheless, there was no fear in him — at least, not at the level that was present, that watched the doctors taking readings off the machines, recording his vitals in their notebooks, checking his restraints against the cold metallic chair. But there were parts of him where the real fear still lived. He could not bring it up, and examine, or control, but he felt it stirring in the pit of his mind.
At the periphery of his consciousness, he knew what they were thinking: those failed parts of himself had gotten in the way, had compromised his mission; like a bad reflex in the wrong direction at the worst moment. So they were going to try harder this time, keep trying, keep trying, until they cleaned up all that was left of his dissenting self at the bottom of his brain.
The Soldier waited for them to begin, like last time, and the time before that. But some were talking to each other, some were sitting down and waiting, others were drinking their coffee... They were doing things they weren't supposed to do, and the part of him where the fear settled was starting to itch. What was different about this time?
Get out get out get out.
When he heard the echoes of a walking pair come closer, saw their shadows licking up the wall beyond the foggy lab door, and saw them stop to talk right outside, the Soldier didn't think, nor feel, nor react, and for once it wasn't because the Soldier didn't do that, but because he made a conscious effort not to.
He didn't miss the guarded gaze shared between the nurses securing his legs, but then they got up, and with the rest they gathered their gadgets and scopes and manila folders and ambled out of the room. The pair outside waited for them all to leave, exchanged some parting words, then one of them went inside with him and the other closed the door with a hiss and a click: locked.
The Soldier had never seen this doctor before. Was that what she was? She did wear a lab coat, with the Hydra insignia pinned to her lapel, a standard issue name tag, and had in every other way the look of all the rest of them.
The way she looked at him that first time, scanned him from a safe distance as she clung to her folders like a lifeline, told him she had never seen him before, at least not up-close. But her eyes didn't linger on his metal arm — so she knew about it? They didn't stay anywhere very long, though she did direct a second's worth of a frown at his naked chest — oh, were they supposed to have dressed him up for her?
She took a deep breath, thinking so loudly he could almost hear it, then took a solid step forward in a straight line toward him. Her scent could reach him now, a sweet and stinging perfume that was familiar but now unrecognisable, with fresh notes on her throat and warmer aftertastes lingering in her hair, which was clasped back in a tight French twist. Underneath that, soap and bitter coffee, the sterile air of the facilities, and freshly ironed cotton. She looked right at him, and through him. Perhaps she did not like how his eyes followed hers. She seemed afraid, but of him?
Of failure.
She came to a stop at the table by his side and busied herself arranging her files. Her shirt looked standard issue: white, pressed, keeping its form rigidly while her tight chest fluttered underneath. Her waist held her up stiffly, unmoving, as she bent slightly forward. Her straight black skirt went down to her knees. Her legs were clad in imperceptibly thin stockings, tapering in black doeskin shoes.
The Soldier's gaze caressed its way back up to her face to find her disapproving look waiting for him. He looked back without shame, taking in her elegant little features gentled by large eyes, a soft mouth, lashes that left spiderweb-shadows on her cheeks under the clinical light.
She kept her eyes on him unwavering as she stepped back and around to face him, to look at him from the other side, then closer, then back again. She was examining him like all the others did - like an object - but he didn't mind. Her attention melted the fear away.
Finally, she got closer, and with a touch made to gentle a wild animal tilted his head back and up. She stood to his right where his flesh arm was, checked his pupil dilation with a little light, checked his pulse with her fingers, his blood-oxygen with a pinch at his thumb — he could have told her the other doctors already went through this with him.
But why tell her anyway?
And just like that, she was back to not looking at him. She finished her check-up and turned briskly back to her papers. He noted her face had moved first and her body followed — disgust, avoidance; ah, did he smell? They never did prioritise cleaning him after a mission.
"Can you speak?" she asked, looking straight at him again.
"Yes."
"What are you?"
"Soldier."
"What am I?"
"Doctor."
"Sit up straight... Now close your eyes."
He heard her step closer, heard her stop right in front of him, between his spread legs. Her voice was so close now, and much too soft.
"I'm going to touch the sides of your face. You will tell me if it feels the same."
She lightly ran the tips of her fingers from his temples, down his cheekbones, down the hollowed stubbled cheeks, ending at his chin, then back up and down again.
"Same?"
"Yes."
"Keep your eyes closed. I'm going to make small sounds with my fingers next to your ears, you will tell me which side it's on."
"Right. Left. Right. Right."
"Open your eyes now."
He caught sight of her just as she stepped back.
"Did they finish the repairs on you?"
He looked at his left arm and saw everything was closed back up. "Yes."
"Alright. Make fists with both of your hands, and hold them up, like this. Alright, now keep them steady and don't let me press them down."
She tested his right fist, then his left, her hands barely covering the span of his knuckles. Both fists were steady as rocks against her efforts.
"Now, close your eyes again. Can you touch your thumb to your index on your right hand? Good, now go through all the fingers, touch the thumb to the fingertip... then back to the index. Good. Now your left hand, keep your eyes closed."
He could hear her throat work to swallow at the clink-clink of the metal digits.
"Alright, stop."
She stepped back to the table, picked up a little silver hammer with a rubber head, then came back to his side. "Keep your right arm relaxed, I'm just going to check your reflex."
She pressed her dry, cold thumb to the inside of his elbow and tap-tapped against her finger, his arm bouncing slightly in its confines.
"Alright, now I'm going to do something a little silly. But you won't laugh at me, will you?"
"No." His dry delivery didn't put her much at ease.
Moving to his left side, she did the same thing to his metal arm. She tapped the little hammer over her thumb, where the inside of the titanium elbow was, and tapped and tapped.
"Makes sense I guess..." she said to herself when nothing happened.
As she ran her tests on him, he could feel her relax, noticed her start to speak not just at him but to him, like other people spoke to each other. The Soldier wasn't sure it was smart of her to drop her guard like that, but he couldn't begrudge it. He wanted to speak to her like a real person too, but the want knocked itself against a wall.
She worked her way around him, back to a desk, sat down primly, opened a folder, crossed out some boxes on a yellowed piece of paper... He watched her openly, sliding his gaze down to her tightly-crossed legs and back up, but was not too fixated on the ornamental parts of her to not notice her swallow hard and squeeze her pen as she became instinctively aware of being looked at.
"I'm going to ask you some questions." she said without looking up. "Do you know where we are?"
He had to think for a second for this one. "Headquarters Alpha 3."
"What's the nearest town?"
"I don't know."
"What country are we in?"
"I don't know."
"What day of the week is it?"
"I don't know."
"Do you know what year it is?"
"No."
She wrote something down and sighed — she wasn't disappointed, was she? After all, he didn't need to know those things. But when she looked back up, she didn't seem upset with him. She even smiled at him a little, he almost smiled back.
"There are some more tests I want to run, but I can't do that with you tied up. We'll have another session, if it's approved."
He didn't nod, didn't blink, didn't betray the hope he felt at the anticipation of being trusted. Even untied, she would be safe with him, he wouldn't hurt her. Did they know that? Did she know that?
A knock on the door grabbed her attention. Too eagerly for his liking, she jumped up and opened it.
"Done?"
"Yes, I'll just get my things."
Standing just a step inside the room, the Director looked straight at him, then turned his attention back to her, waiting.
They stepped outside together, but by negligence or uncaring left the door ajar. He listened on as they whispered to each other.
"So?"
"Both hemispheres seem very well coordinated, as well as I can tell considering the arm... There seems to be no... leakage of anything from one side or the other, or from previous missions. To me, the Asset seems fully functional. But I need more tests to assess the state of his memory."
"What's the problem?"
"As I suggested in my proposal, Sir, the methods used in the Project affect his explicit memory, but the implicit memory isn't really addressed. I need confirmation."
"And what does that mean?"
"It means we should probably schedule..."
"No, what you said about his memory."
"Oh, well... As I wrote to you, Sir..." She took a pause to swallow her words. "Explicit memory is... the things you can bring forward in an instant, that you can talk about. But if you were to... if you were to smell a perfume, for example, and you suddenly remembered it because it was what your mother wore when you were a child, that's implicit memory. It stays in the brain but you don't know it's there unless there's a stimulus. And because it's there, it can still influence what you do, even if you don't realise it..."
"I see. Couldn't our equipment fix it?"
"I don't think it can be calibrated for something like that. Such memories are usually connected to real functions, like muscle memory or the senses. And besides, wiping him repeatedly probably resets his integration level, which can be counterproductive... especially if he was predisposed to higher disintegration before the serum."
"So what do you need?"
"First of all, he might need to be kept... er, thawed, at least for a while."
"If your little experiment is a failure, we're gonna waste valuable time on him."
"It's just that it isn't good to freeze and unfreeze even an ordinary slab of meat, let alone a complex animal like that. It could be connected to the malfunctions they're reporting with his behaviour. Not to mention the lack of REM sleep, which makes it even worse for stabilising his thinking, his reflexes..."
"Alright, we have empty cells we can keep him in."
"And for the next session, if it's approved Sir, we should maybe have a brand new room. Not this lab, and not somewhere where he's locked down. Subjects usually form underlying associations with common environments, it impedes the process."
"I fear we might be spoiling him, you know. His own 'suite', his own lounge now, no more cryo, and I don't know when the last time was that he saw a woman..."
"Certainly he sees them all the time on missions, Sir."
"Yeah, through a scope. Will that be all?"
"One more thing... if it's possible, to not have surveillance during the sessions, Sir..."
"And why would you ask for that?"
"In case I need to apply unethical methods."
"'Though I can respect that, don't you think you're asking for a bit much?"
"Oh, please Sir."
The Soldier could hear the smile in her voice, the deliberate lightening of the tone to something girlish, and through the fogged glass he saw her brush a hand over the Director's elbow, just quickly enough to stay professional. The armrest under his bionic arm started creaking in his grip.
"I'll keep it all under budget, I promise. Oh, and could we maybe arrange to have him washed more often?"
"I'm going to leave before you ask for dessert. You better deliver."
"Yes, Sir. Hail Hydra."
"Hail Hydra."