Chapter Text
Prelude
- Misirlou Mediterranean Traditional. Originally recorded by Nikos Roubanis, 1927. Recorded by Jan August, 1946. Recorded by Dick Dale and his Del-Tones, 1962. Recorded by 2Cellos, 2011.
Later, in the museum, the Soldier doesn’t know what‘s worse: the horror of remembering, or the nameless fear of all the things he may have forgotten. What is James Buchanan Barnes? A collection of cells? A beating heart? A smile and a uniform?
Is he a messy bundle of memories and experiences? A mother baking bread, sisters running and screaming, a father singing soft and low... Is he a strange amalgamation of songs heard and books read and lessons learned? And what if those are taken away? What then? What’s left? Just a steady hand and a trigger finger?
Maybe it’s like Plato thought, like Aristophanes said, that he’s just a part of a whole person. Maybe, once upon a time, in some ancient past, he was a being with four legs and four arms, until some wrathful, jealous god split him in two. Is half of him walking around in someone else’s body, always looking for its missing pieces? Is he just an absence of something, blindly seeking someone?
Or is he nothing more than an animal thing, trapped at the bottom of a ravine, so desperate to live that he’ll take his father’s pocket knife and hack away the shredded pieces of his broken arm, just to be free again?
He shudders, and shakes off that memory. You’re a goddamn drama queen is what you are, he thinks to himself, as he stares down the grainy images of a past that’s just coming back to him. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it must be fuckin’ contagious. That blonde putz really rubbed off on you.
Except he didn’t, did he. And isn’t that a crying goddamn shame.
1
Путь далёк у нас с тобою,
Веселей, солдат, гляди!
- В Путь by Vasily Solovyov-Sedoi and Mikhail Dudin, 1954.
The Winter Soldier is made of fear.
It is the first thing he knows, even before he knows that he is the Winter Soldier. He wakes up, alone, every inch of him bitten through with cold, near delirious with the pain. He has no memory of where he is, or how he got here, or what his goddamn name is.
Well fuck, he thinks, and the terror chokes him.
He looks down at himself and mother fucker, he is pretty sure he's supposed to have two arms. Jesus Christ that's a lot of blood.
The worst part is, he looks at it and knows, just knows that he cut that sucker off himself. He can't even say how, but he knows that it was crushed under something, and like a fox in a trap, he left a piece of himself behind, hoping for escape.
He isn't going to escape.
He's going to die here. God, he's going to die and he doesn't even know who he is.
Tears squeeze out of the corners of his eyes and freeze where they fall.
He waits for death.
It doesn't come.
Well shit, he thinks, eventually, and gets to his feet. It hurts. Everything hurts, obviously. And even though he cannot remember a time when it didn't goddamn hurt, he knows that this is pain, and that there is such a thing as a lack of pain.
He staggers away in a random direction, hoping vaguely that he isn’t the only person in the world. There is, he thinks, such a thing as help. Maybe he can find some.
He doesn't.
The snow falls harder, faster. A storm. He’s been walking for a long time, along the riverbed. Maybe for miles. The ravine has widened out and trees have come in around him. He keeps walking. He can’t stop now. His fear is white and blank like the snow around him, but he keeps walking. He… keeps…
He doesn't remember falling, but he's on his back in the snow. He's staring at the sky. His arm -- his stump, anyway -- isn't bleeding so much anymore. He doesn't know if that's good or bad. He's starting to feel warm. He doesn't know if that's good or bad either, but he'll call it a fucking improvement, thank you very much.
Maybe he's walked far enough. Maybe death can find him here.
He waits.
He listens to his own heart in his ears.
Thu-thump. Thump-thump… thump… thump…
This is not the first time he dies. It will not be the last.
His skin aches and burns all over. Like getting in a hot bath after a long walk in the cold -- when did that happen? His skin knows the feeling but his brain doesn’t know why. Can’t recall a specific instance, a specific walk or a specific bath. He just knows that’s what it feels like. Burning all over. The pain inside him, coming out, banging into the pain outside him, coming in.
He opens his eyes.
Snow. Sky.
Soldiers over him.
He looks down at himself. There is a stump where he thinks there should be an arm. But that doesn’t surprise him. He doesn’t know why that doesn’t surprise him. It’s bleeding (again, he thinks, though he doesn’t know why.) His heart is beating (again, he thinks, even though that’s impossible, isn’t it? Evidently not, he thinks, reasonably enough.)
“Дерьмо! Он жив,” says a voice overhead. He doesn’t know the words.
He closes his eyes. He drifts.
There are hands -- someone is touching his shoulder and without thinking, he lashes out, strikes with his legs. His hand -- his one hand, palms at his jacket automatically. There a handle under his fingers, a knife in his hand, and then he strikes. A slick feeling, a rush of hot wet sticky over his hand, a scream, and it is sticking out of the man’s neck. The man who was touching him. The man in the Russian uniform. (How does he know that is a Russian uniform?)
Pain explodes at the back of his head.
The world goes white.
He wakes. (Again?) His head aches like a sunovabitch. He has no idea where he is, who he is. He opens his eyes. There’s a low concrete ceiling overhead. He tries to sit up and he’s--
He can’t move his arms, his legs. He looks down, he only has one arm: the other is a bandage-wrapped stump. There are straps, holding him in place: across his arm, his chest, his legs. This has happened before, his body knows it. This happened before, this happened, this --
The fear is so thick he can’t form words, even in his own head.
“Кто ты?” He jerks his head up, around. There’s a woman. She’s younger than him by a few years, he thinks, without really knowing what makes him think that. She’s standing in a far corner of the room. She looks as scared as he is. He can’t understand her.
“Wer bist du?” she says, in a different way. He almost understands this, his brain trying to summon up the--
“Tu chi sei?” she says, after a moment. He can taste something in the back of his throat. Wine. But he doesn’t know what the words mean.
“Qui es-tu?” she says. He knows this, he knows this -- it smells like cordite and explosives, the harsh smoke of burning and the sweet smoke of tobacco, but he doesn’t know why that is. And he can’t find an answer that matches. Can’t find the right words.
“Who are you?” she says, and her voice is strange and thick sounding to him. Too deep in her chest, too lingering on the r.
The words come out of him before he knows he’s going to speak. “Lady, I got no fuckin’ idea.”
Her eyes widen. “Боже мой,” she says. “Karpov был прав.”
Only one word of that sticks in his aching head. “Karpov?” he says, confused.
They call him “the American,” though he isn’t sure what that is. It gives him strange echoes in his head. A thick smell of garbage and exhaust; raucous, nasal accents, loud laughter, the crack of a ball and a rising cheer and -- and --
He doesn’t tell them about the echoes. They are jumbled, disconnected -- too much and not enough all at the same time. He’s fuckin nuts, is what he is. He belongs in a goddamn bughouse. Maybe this is a bughouse. Maybe these weirdos are loony bin doctors. They frighten him, with their thick accents and their strange clothes. They are frightened of him in return. He is a danger, they say, to himself and others. “Okay,” he says, unsure. He doesn’t feel dangerous. He doesn’t see how a one-armed American is a danger to anyone, but…
They are afraid of him. His fear feeds off their fear.
But there is an uneasy truce. They feed him, and he was ravenous . He shoves the food in his mouth like an animal, one-handed. What were you raised by wolves? says a voice in his head. A woman’s voice. He can also hear her saying feh! But he doesn’t know who she is. And he doesn’t stop shoveling food in his mouth. He’s too hungry to do otherwise, and for all he knows he was raised by wolves.
When he’s done, they show him to a room with a bed. He sleeps like the dead.
The next day, he scratches at the bandages on his stump so much that the doctors take them off, thinking that there must be infection. There is no infection. There is pink new skin closing over the wound. It is thin and raw and itchy as all hell. The doctors freak the fuck out about that, which makes him think maybe that isn’t supposed to happen?
“No,” says the woman, when he asks her about it. She’s a secretary, he thinks. “You’re doing very well. Better than they thought. They’re excited about it.”
“I don’t feel very fuckin’ reassured,” he mutters. She doesn’t translate that.
They take samples -- his blood, his hair, a small scrape of skin from his stump -- the skin is so new that the pain of that radiates through him and he thrashes, bucks against the restraints and screams and screams. The doctors flee quickly, but the woman stays with him as he comes down from the pain of it.
She tries to reassure him, but she’s too frightened to actually touch him.
I’m dangerous, he thinks. She’s scared of me because I’m dangerous.
He doesn’t feel dangerous. But maybe dangerous people don’t.
The third day, his head hurts. They give him something for the pain, but it doesn’t help. He sits in his room, on his cot, and presses the heel of his one remaining hand against the middle of his forehead where the headache is pounding and --
--hands slapping against his in a swift, regular rhythm and Becca’s high voice “--cake, patty cake, baker’s--”
--Ma’s lighting the candles, but she gets too close and hisses in pain. She shakes her hand sharply, then shoves her burned thumb in her mouth. “Son of a bitch...” she says, with her voice muffled by the--
-- “-cky!” Steve shouts, terrified. He’s clinging to the side of the train, every muscle in him straining to hold on, fighting against the biting wind. “Grab my hand!” Steve’s hand is just there, he just needs to reach a little further, but he can feel the bar giving way. Steve’s eyes are so blue, so wide, so frightened. “No!”
He’s falling--
He’s screaming--
He’s--
He is actually screaming, and hammering his fist on the door, and when it opens, he throws himself out through it and attacks the first person who comes at him, twists them around and gets his one good hand around their throat and--
--in the trenches -- the fucking Nazis, they’re in the fucking trenches with him and his fucking gun jammed, so he just gets his arm around the first guy’s throat and squeezes, choking--
He takes the guy’s gun, and he runs down the corridor. An alarm starts blaring. He shoots everyone he sees. He has to get out he--
--they’ve got two minutes left till the building blows, so they’re running, his eyes fixed on that fucking shield, the goddamn target on Steve’s broad back--
He comes around a corner and bang . He sees white and falls back, and cracks the back of his skull against the cement. He stares up, vision swimming. A figure steps into view. It’s the woman, the secretary. She’s holding a metal bar. He can feel blood trickling hot down his face, pooling behind his head.
“Что вы наделали?” someone says. It’s a scientist, he sees when the man steps into view.
“Я спасла наши жизни,” she replies, harsh. She’s breathing hard, he notices through a fading haze of pain. She’s terrified, he realizes. She’s scared of him. She’s scared of dying.
He knows the fucking feeling.
He wakes. (Again?) He aches all over. (Like stepping into hot water after too long in the snow. How does he know?) He has no idea where he is, who he is. He is cold. So cold. He is shivering, uncontrollably. He opens his eyes.
There are two men with guns pointed at him. He tenses, feels straps against his chest, his legs, his one arm. There is a woman. She’s about his age, he thinks, without really knowing what makes him think that. She’s standing between the two men with their guns pointed at him. She doesn’t look scared.
“You know who I am?” she asks, eyes narrowed, sharp. Like maybe he should.
He doesn’t. He shakes his head.
“Do you know who you are?” she asks.
“Lady,” he manages. Does ice flake from his lips? His teeth are chattering. “I got no fuckin’ idea.”
They tell him that he’s been sick, and that they need to do some tests. They have needles, and swabs, and painkillers -- they tell him that they’re painkillers, but they keep having to try different things, and eventually they make him feel kind of woozy, weird and relaxed. But it doesn’t last very long. They keep having to give him more. They listen to his heart, his lungs. They take lots of pictures. They examine the stump of his arm: the scarring is old, pale, well-healed.
On the third night, he gets a headache, and they give him something for it, but it doesn’t stop the wave of --
--leans against Steve, who can bear his weight easily now. His forehead presses against the side of Steve’s neck, and it’s hot, skin burning against Bucky’s. “You runnin’ a fever, Rogers?” he asks, an old fear coming back--
--looking up and seeing the figure, emaciated, golden, lit from below by candlelight, and a voice saying “in nomine patrii, et filii, et spiritu sancti” and--
--“Кто ты?” He jerks his head up, around. There’s a woman. She’s younger than him by a few years, he thinks, without really knowing--
The woman -- it’s the same woman, the same-- But she’s older, now, she’s older. He’s missing time.
He’s missing years.
This time, he kills three guards before they take him down, piling on and jabbing him with needles until his muscles go limp and he stops struggling. The woman is standing over him, looking annoyed. “Take him to the freezer,” she says. “We’ll have to try something else.”
He wakes. (Again.) He aches all over (like he’s warming up after fever chills, coming back into his own skin). He has no idea where he is, who he is. He opens his eyes.
He is in a dark hole: a prison cell with a cot, a toilet, a sink, and nothing else. The only light comes through the grating overhead. He only has one arm. There is no one there.
They deliver food to him once a day. The food comes three times before the headache happens. It’s strong enough that he thinks he’s going to die from it. He thinks he’s going to be sick. He curls on his cot, hand fisted in his lanky hair, pulling hard.
He remembers --
And remembers --
And remembers --
He remembers everything.
“Mother fuckers!” he howls.
He gives up shouting at the guards when he realizes that they don’t understand him. They’re Russians. He wonders if he served with any of them on the front, back in the war. He never picked up much Russian: a few swears (very useful) and some questions (less useful.) But when he stammers out a request to speak to Major Karpov, one of them looks at him oddly. He says: “General Karpov?” In Russian, and Bucky feels cold all over.
He needs to sit. His knees are shaking. He presses his back to the wall and sinks down, sitting in the corner of his cell. His oubliette, he thinks. He tries to breathe. His head still aches. He’s still… his mind is a mess, a scattered, shattered thing. None of this makes any sense.
He tries to piece together some broken Russian. “Какие… год?” He thinks they’re the right words. What year?
The guards just look confused, peering down at him through the round grate, then looking at each other, then back down at him. “тысяча девятьсот пятидесятый год?” one of them says, slowly.
Bucky has no idea what it means. He puts his aching head between his knees. He tries to remember how to breathe.
He remembers forgetting. He keeps forgetting who he is, and just that is enough to make him feel crazy. Because he is fucking crazy. This is crazy.
He remembers falling, remembers hacking his crushed fucking arm off with a goddamn pocket knife, remembers waking up and not knowing who he was, where he was. He remembers dying. He’s sure he died. After he fell, and then maybe again in the snow. And he thinks the Russians killed him a couple of times…
He starts to shake.
Shit. Fuck. Shit, shit, shit, what is he? What did they do to him?
He’d had his suspicions before, during the war, taking shrapnel wounds that healed too fast, Morita looking confused, suspicious. He remembers Steve telling him about how he could see colors so much more clearly after the serum, and hear everything, even heartbeats. He remembers realizing, with a horrified twist in his gut, that the strange dissonant thrumming he could hear all the time was just that: heartbeats. He remembers being able to smell everything, sickeningly vivid in his nose: the reek of blood, the smell of all the individual rations, tacky pine smells and Steve --
Steve.
Bucky curls tighter, pulling his one arm in to his chest, clutching at the neck of his shirt. Steve will have no idea, no idea that Bucky’s here. Who’s watching Steve’s back now?
Is he even alive?
Well, hell. If he’s like Bucky. If Bucky’s like him, if…
If whatever Zola gave him was anything like what Steve got.
Sometimes the food is drugged and when he wakes up, he can tell that they’ve been taking his blood, little slivers of skin, shaving patches out of his hair. Taking bits of him to study, like he’s a goddamn lab rat again. Which makes sense. With a sick lurch, he remembers what Karpov said (General Karpov, now, apparently): I would like twenty of him, and a hundred of him, please, with a bright, eager smile in Bucky’s direction. Just the thought of it makes his skin crawl.
The days are endless and incredibly boring. He does one-armed push-ups. He shadowboxes, does lopsided jumping jacks. He tries climbing the walls (literally) but even with his strength, he can’t quite make it. He starts to waste away, and thinks of Steve scarfing down double rations. They give him more food when they notice. He eats it grimly, and stops losing weight, at least. He needs to be strong, to be healthy, if he’s gonna have any kind of chance of getting out of here.
He tries to work out how many days. It’s a lot. His eyes have adjusted to the dark, but he’s…
Fuck. He’s lonely. The only contact he has is either while unconscious or awkward one-sided conversations with the guards.
He misses Steve.
He misses the guys -- even fucking Dum Dum. He misses his ma, his pa. He misses the hell out of Becca and Jeanie and Susan. He misses little Judith, wonders if she’s okay.
It’s too fucking quiet down here. He sings constantly, to keep himself sane and annoy his guards. Old songs from his childhood, the jazzy tunes he used to dance to, the dirty French songs that Dernier taught them all. At first, the guards bang on the grate, wanting him to shut up, but in the end…
Well. After a while they start making requests, in the scraps of English they’ve picked up from him. “No!” they say. “Not that one, do--” and then they hum a bar or two. Sometimes he obliges, but mostly he’ll say “Listen pal, I ain’t the fucking house band!” and sing something else, even louder, out of spite.
It’s a strange kind of friendship, but starved for contact as he is, he’s -- he could always --
--“You could make friends with anyone, Bucky,” says Steve, shaking his head in wonderment. “You could talk Hitler into giving you Berlin, I swear to God.”--
The guards start to teach him Russian. It doesn’t take as long as he thinks it probably ought to. The guards are impressed. The scientists are giddy.
Until he starts asking questions.
“What year is it?”
“Is the war over?”
“What happened to Captain America?”
The guards clam up. They must have been told not to tell him anything, but…
They give him drugs in his food again. But this time, he doesn’t wake up.
He wakes. (Again, Jesus Christ.) He aches all over (like he’s got bruises fuckin’ everywhere). He has no idea where he is, who he is. He opens his eyes.
He is lying in a bed, in a room. The room is red. There is a woman beside him, looking worried. She’s a few years older than him, he thinks. Maybe five or six. She smiles when she sees him.
What?
“You’re awake,” she says. “It’s alright, you’re safe here.” She’s speaking Russian. Is he Russian? He can understand her. He must be Russian.
They tell him that he’s a soldier, that she’s his sister, that he lost his arm and hit his head. They’re trying to get him back on his feet, they say. They put him on a thing like an overturned tank tread (a treadmill, they tell him). They have him punch a foam block with his one hand. He punches through it. They test his reflexes. His reflexes are good.
He speaks Russian all the time, now, but as the hours pass, the words sound stranger and stranger in his head. He tries to stay calm about that. There’s something wrong with his brain, they say, and if he finds himself having any strange thoughts, he should tell them right away.
He doesn’t trust them. But he wishes he could. He’s so scared.
His hearing is extremely good, but they don’t ask him about his hearing, so he doesn’t tell them that.
He can overhear the woman -- his sister, they keep telling him she’s his sister -- talking to one of the doctors in the next room. “They may be on our side, but I don’t trust him. He’s a traitor, no matter how he pretties it up with lies and groveling. What’s more, he’s a German. The Soldier--” that’s him, he thinks, that’s me, “--belongs to Russia. If Zola wants him, he’ll have to pry him from my cold, dead hands.”
“He’s Swiss, actually. Not German.”
The next day, the Soldier remembers.
She’s not his fucking sister.
He kills her first.
He is screaming when they take him back to the freezer. It’s the first time he’s awake when it happens. They strap him into the chair, and slam the door. He howls and spits and swears until the tiny room fills with air so cold it burns him and--
He wakes. He is strapped down, in a small room, and he is shivering so violently that the straps rattle against the sides of the chair. He has no idea who he is, where he is. There is a man standing in the open door of the small room. He has a beard, but he looks young.
“This is what we have to work with?” the man says, in Russian. “How long does it last?”
There is another man standing behind him, with the air of a soldier standing to attention. “The notes say that he is generally pliable for the first three days. Then, headaches. Memories return. They have theorized that it’s the brain self-repairing somehow: seems to prioritize life-threatening injuries, then works steadily to repair more peripheral damage. He becomes more and more unstable. Violent. But especially in the beginning, he’s like this.” The man waves a hand, gesturing at the way he is strapped down.
Like what? Shaking? Terrified? Desperately afraid and confused and aching?
“Compliant,” the second man says to the man with the beard.
“Well. Let's see what we're working with.”
They take him from the small room, and have him do tests. They test his reflexes, his strength. They test his brain. They tell him things and ask him questions. They make him watch bright flashing videos that make his head ache, and then ask him questions about what he saw. They ask him what he remembers.
He remembers nothing. He doesn't know who he is, where he is. If he is compliant, he thinks…
Maybe they won't put him back in the small, cold room again.
On the second day, new people arrive. They don’t speak Russian. They speak English. They bring in a metal box, long and narrow, like a coffin. He immediately doesn’t like it. They order him to lie down inside, and he does, but he doesn’t like it, he doesn’t like--
They close the lid.
His heartbeat thunders in his ears at the close space, the narrow window. He's so frightened. He's so--
“Ready for transport,”one of them says. He can barely hear it over the sounds of his own sharp, shallow breathing. It echoes off the interior of the tank, filling his head.
And then; the ice.
He wakes. (Not again.) He aches all over (like he hasn’t slept in days.) He has no idea where he is, who he is. It feels like he’s moving. Rolling, or reeling... He opens his eyes. Lights flash by overhead. He can hear a sound -- a wheel squeaking. He’s on a gurney.
“He’s waking up. Turn up the drip,” someone says, with an edge of fear in their voice. They’re speaking English. He sounds… like he’s from out West somewhere. California, maybe?
He fades out.
He wakes in the middle of the surgery. They’re hacking at the stump of his arm with a saw. “Up the dosage again, he can take it,” someone is saying (not him, not him, please, oh god, please--) “We can’t have him waking now. The procedure has already started.”
He fades out.
His shoulder aches. He feels -- his arm is cold. His left arm. It’s freezing. He lifts his hands and--
Oh god. Oh fucking shit, Jesus Christ--
Mismatched hands. One flesh, the other metal, shiny, glinting under the lights. But… it’s his. He can move it. He flexes it into a fist. It feels strange. He can sense the pressure of his unyielding metal fingers pressing into his unyielding metal palm, but there’s only that. And cold, radiating out into his shoulder, aching.
A man is coming over, and fear tears at his chest. They’ve already done this to him, what else is coming?
His metal hand shoots out, grabs the throat. He squeezes hard, lifts him up. He can hear gears whining in his forearm, his grip tightens with a crunch and--
There’s a sharp jab of something in his thigh.
A man with glasses. He smiles. “Sergeant Barnes.”
Who?
He fades out.
“The Russians want him back,” says someone. He doesn’t recognize the voice. “They’ve got a new wonder boy, one of Fenhoff’s little disciples. Says he can turn the science experiment into an asset. A real, tactical asset. I don’t know how in the hell they’re planning to control--”
“Brainwashing, if my spies are correct,” says the man with the glasses. His voice is different. Swiss. He’s Swiss. “Well. Let them. Put him on ice. We’ll send him back.”
The Swiss guy, he had said -- Sergeant Barnes --
“Who am I?” he asks, voice a croak in his own ears. The Swiss guy with the glasses and the American guy he’d been talking to, they both turn to look at him.
“Oh shit,” says the American. He looks terrified. He brings a radio to his mouth. “The Soldier is awake, send backup, we need--”
He breaks the restraints, grabs the radio with his flesh hand and crunches it into broken plastic, twisted metal. He sends the American flying with his metal fist and whirls on the Swiss man. “Who am I?” he repeats, in a furious bellow.
A door bursts open behind him. He feels the jab of darts in his back. The muscles immediately go lax. And then he’s on his knees. The Swiss man smiles, shakily at first.
“Wha… what am I?” the Soldier asks, words slurring together, panic and drugs and adrenaline mixing in his head. A thick cocktail of confusion.
“You will be the new fist of Hydra,” says the man with the glasses.
Fuck you, buddy, the Soldier thinks, and the terror chokes him.
He wakes in the tank. There is a small glass window in front of him, metal on all sides. His breathing echoes back at him. Fast. Faster. He can smell his own fear, and a harsh smell, chemicals. He can hear—
Distant. Echoing. Voices. He holds his breath, to listen.
“--not have been possible on a less resilient subject,” says the Swiss man. “But we do what we can with the available technology,” he adds, simpering, “Do we not, Comrade Lukin?”
“Are we comrades?” asks a Russian voice. Chilly and unfriendly sounding. “Hm. If you say so. But it works, this… prosthetic?”
“The Vibranium alloy shell is all but indestructible. The mechanics within are designed for durability, for strength. We had to apply extensive reinforcements, along the scapula and across the ribs, bracing on the spine as well, to ensure that he can bear the weight of it, but yes. I assure you that it will operate just as we might hope.”
“We shall see,” Lukin says. “And this new tank you have designed. The portability, very useful. The base in Siberia is very remote, but the power requirements cannot be met anywhere else. I would be curious to know how this one meets those requirements without needing to be plugged in.”
“Its battery units are of a special sort, very expensive, but designed for portability.” The Swiss man sounds vaguely irritated by the question -- cool and distant.
“By whom?”
“Excuse me?”
“Designed by whom?” Lukin says.
A pause. “By me, of course,” says the Swiss man.
Inside the tank, the Soldier turns his head, looks around. Cold metal on all sides. There is a metal plate over his head, a little disc of tin, like a dog tag. A logo: the outline of it like the nose of a bullet train: sleek, racing towards the future. The name inside: Stark.
He shivers and then stills himself when the arm -- the metal arm -- rattles against the tank.
“Shall I show you how the freezing process works?” Zola says.
“Please.”
He looks back to the little window. Two figures are there, little more than silhouettes against the bright lights. Then, the lights dim. And suddenly, he can--
His reflection, in the round window--
That’s him, that’s him . He knows that face, he--
The tank comes to life around him, hissing. The chemical smell intensifies, and the cold, the cold--
He reaches out, his hand -- the metal hand, riming over with frost.
Thu-thump, thu-thump, goes his heart, as the cold burns and bites into him, hissing like snakes. Thump-thump… thump thump… thump… thump…
And then, the nothingness.