Chapter Text
The Winter Soldier
April 15th, 2014. Washington, D.C.
Cold wasn't the word the Winter Soldier would use to describe what cryogenic sleep felt like, when consciousness came back, but the body had yet to awaken.
This wasn't just cold, it was sheer absence. A void he floated in, until someone came and pulled him out of it, like being rescued from a lake whilst drowning. The familiar hiss and groan of the cryostasis pod releasing its hold vibrated through the metal frame pressed against his back. Light, harsh and clinical, stabbed through his eyelids even before they opened.
He blinked, vision swimming, the sterile white and yellow walls of the vault beneath the Ideal Federal Savings Bank resolving into sharp focus. The routine was so ingrained that he hardly even needed the technicians to help him from the pod and prepare him for duty.
But then his gaze, sharpening with predatory instinct, snagged on something wrong. To his left, where only empty space or perhaps another weapons rack should have been, stood a second cryogenic pod. Within, a human silhouette. Female?
Confusion was all he felt when looking at it. He had never been thawed alongside another asset. The protocol was singular; isolation was king, he knew this. So he just stared, mystified, water dripping from his hair onto the cold tile floor, as the pod's mechanisms mimicked his own release cycle. The hiss, the groan, and the slow, mechanical opening.
The woman inside slumped forward as the restraints disengaged, caught by waiting technicians. She was slight, clad in the same standard-issue grey under-suit, her long, pale blonde hair plastered wetly to her skull and shoulders, so long it almost fell to her hips.
They pulled her out, supporting her unsteady form. Her head lolled, then slowly lifted. Pale, ice-blue eyes, clouded with the disorientation of cryo-sleep, scanned the room. They passed over the technicians, the sterile vault walls, and then locked onto him.
The Soldier stared back, impassive. A blank slate. An instrument awaiting programming. Her eyes widened. Not with fear, not with the usual dull shock of revival, but with a dawning, visceral recognition. It was a look that pierced the fog of cryo and the deeper fog within his own mind.
Her lips, pale and cracked, parted. A rasp, weak but startlingly clear in the vault's silence, escaped her, the words slurred Russian.
"Ya znayu tebya, Soldat." (I know you, Soldier.)
The words landed like pebbles dropped into a still, frozen lake. They caused no ripple he could consciously perceive, yet something still reacted, deep within him. An echo he couldn't quite hear, even if he strained to hear it. He searched her face, the sharp cheekbones, the determined set of her jaw beneath the pallor, those unnervingly pale eyes fixed on him.
His voice, when it came, was an impersonal rasp, answering her in English instead, "I don't know you."
The Soldier saw the impact of his reply strike her like a physical blow. That light of recognition in her eyes didn't just fade; it shattered, morphing into a profound, aching sadness that seemed too vast for her slight frame. She didn't protest further. Didn't demand recognition from him. She was already defeated before she'd even tried to fight for whatever it was she wanted of him so desperately.
"I know."
Two words that contained such loss that he couldn't even begin to comprehend it, it was a feeling he was entirely numb to, now. She knew him, and he didn't know her. What did that mean? Why did it devastate her so?
Did he mean something, to her? How, when he'd never laid eyes on her before this moment?
One of the technicians, a man with a bored expression and a scanner in hand, frowned as the device emitted a soft, insistent chirp near the woman's temple. He glanced at the readout, then at her bowed head, the silent tears tracking through the residue of cryo-frost on her cheeks.
"Elevated neural distress. Psychogenic instability," He announced, his tone clinical and dismissive, "—She can't be deployed like this, it would be unsafe for the Soldier. Protocol dictates re-stasis pending behavioural assessment. Let's prep her for transfer."
Transfer? The Soldier remained still, observing. The woman didn't resist as the technicians guided her back towards the open maw of her pod. Her eyes never left his face, even as they began reattaching sensors, even as they manoeuvred her stiffening limbs. That look on her face, the terrible grief... It was a look meant for someone he wasn't, someone he couldn't remember being.
"Well, General Karpov has been requesting more operational flexibility," Another technician muttered, checking a tablet, "We'll send her there and let him deal with the instability. He has past experience with this Widow that might prove beneficial in resolving this."
A new expression crossed her face at the mention of that name, and it was terror. She shut her eyes against it and exhaled shakily, but her hands still began to tremble.
Karpov. The name meant nothing to him. Widow, another anomaly. Another piece of data that failed to compute with what he could recall and remember to be true. He was the Fist. Singular. There was no-one else. Only him. He watched as the glass fogged again, and she was sealed away to float in the void he knew so well.
The vault door hissed open, and Alexander Pierce entered, his steps precise on the tile floor. He wore a tailored suit, radiating an aura of calm authority that seemed to shrink the sterile room.
The Soldier vaguely recognized the face; sharp features, cool eyes, an impression of command tied to procedures, to the chair, to the ice. Pierce. The identity had lingered, more of a convenience than anything, he'd suspected. Pierce was the sort of man who got very tired, very quickly, of needing to introduce himself to an Asset over and over.
Pierce's gaze swept over the Soldier, then looked to the amber-lit pod beside him. A flicker of something, maybe amusement, maybe satisfaction, flicked across his lips before vanishing.
"Good morning, Soldier," Pierce said, his voice smooth and devoid of warmth. He stopped before him, assessing, "Operational readiness is optimal, I trust?"
The Soldier gave a single, sharp nod. The mission parameters would come. The target would be designated. That was the pattern. But the confused tangle of thoughts in his head, those persisted. He gestured minutely with his metal hand towards the occupied pod.
"The woman. Who is she?" He had to ask. He had to.
Pierce's expression didn't change. He barely glanced at the pod when he replied, "Ah. Only an ancillary asset. Suffering systemic instability. She requires specialized handling elsewhere." He paused, his cool gaze locking onto the Soldier's, probing, testing, "Does her presence here trouble you, Soldier? Have you recalled something, perhaps?"
The Soldier searched within. The void that was her was absolute. No images. No names. No connection he could articulate. Just nothing. An emptiness that didn't sit easily with him.
"No." He finally said, the words flat and final.
A slow, deliberate smile spread across Pierce's face. It held no warmth, only the chilling satisfaction of a scientist confirming a successful experiment.
"Excellent. Seventy years of refinement. Iteration after iteration. And now… Perfection. Not even Zola could have hoped for this."
He stepped closer, his voice dropping slightly with pride, "—The Winter Soldier program stands alone, now. Unburdened. Unmatched. There is only the Fist. There is only you."
Perfection. That word echoed in the sterile vault. It meant the eradication of flaws. The elimination of variables. Like the weeping woman sealed in ice, bound for a man named Karpov who filled her with such fear.
It was like the phantom ache of a severed tether he couldn't name. Pierce's satisfaction was a tangible thing, a confirmation that the emptiness within him was not a failure, but the desired outcome. He could find peace with that, maybe.
Pierce turned and walked out, expecting his compliance. The Soldier followed, his heavy boots echoing on the concrete floor. They ascended from the sterile chill of the cryo chamber, up through the silent, vaulted depths of the Ideal Federal Savings Bank.
The air grew warmer the closer they came to ground level, carrying the faint smell of old paper, dust, and money. Pierce led him to a nondescript service door that opened onto a grimy alley in the heart of Washington, D.C. Daylight, sharp, hit his adjusted eyes. The roar of the city, a constant thrum he hadn't registered below, flooded his senses.
A black SUV idled at the curb. Pierce opened the rear door. "Target is en-route. Intercept coordinates are loaded. Mission parameters; eliminate target Nicholas J. Fury." His hand rested briefly on the Soldier's armoured shoulder. A gesture devoid of camaraderie, heavy with ownership, "Show them why HYDRA's Fist is feared. Confirm, Soldier."
The Soldier slid into the vehicle, "Confirmed."
The door slammed shut behind him. The engine growled, pulling away from the curb, merging into the flow of D.C. traffic. He stared straight ahead, his mind a blank slate, only occupied by the words Pierce had just carved there.
The sterile chill of the bank basement, the hiss of the cryo pods, the technicians' urgent voices, all already fading. The face behind the frost, the eyes wide with terror and sorrow, gone, too.
He was the Winter Soldier. Activated. Alone. The woman was just an irrelevant malfunction, packed in ice and shipped away. He did not have to worry about her. He did not even have to think about her.
Washington blurred past the tinted windows, a target-rich environment awaiting the silent, solitary strike of HYDRA's perfected weapon. The hollow ache where the memory of her grief should have lingered remained empty, unnoticed, just another piece of himself carved away and lost to the ice.
I know you, Soldier.
But he well and truly didn't know her.
The Winter Soldier was... Off.
That was the only explanation he could give for how his target had managed to evade him. He should have had the man dead to rights, but the man, Fury, carved himself a way out that even he hadn't been able to predict. He should have anticipated it. He should have ensured the car was blown to hell properly.
Not only that, but he shouldn't have let Pierce send other men to do his job in the first place.
Now he was crouched on a rooftop, cloaked in the darkness of the spring D.C. night. He had tracked Fury to this unassuming apartment complex. A safehouse, perhaps.
It was that woman, the Soldier decided. Seeing her had jolted something in him, something he couldn't name. It was making him sloppy. Pierce had told him she was an ancillary asset. What did that even mean? He hadn't even been aware HYDRA kept other assets beside him. He'd always been alone.
Hadn't he always been alone?
His grip on his rifle tightened on the Barrett rifle, hard enough that the weapon's frame creaked. He had his mission; that was all that mattered.
You will miss from this angle, Soldier.
"Chto?" (What?) The word slipped out before he could stop it, and it startled him. He looked over his shoulder, certain he would find someone there, but he was alone on the roof. From this vantage point, he could cover all the apartment buildings on this side of the building.
He didn't know which one Fury was in, except that he was in one of them.
The words in his head made no sense. They'd been so clear and vivid, and it was that woman again, he was sure of it. A profound, sick sense of Déjà vu struck him as he adjusted his scope. Except it wasn't quite that; it was like the feeling he'd done this before, but that something was now missing.
Or someone.
A frustrated, wordless growl left him. He was straying into non-compliance with these thoughts. He just needed to finish the mission, eliminate Fury, and then he could return to Pierce. If not to the ice, then to the technicians who would fix this deviancy in his head.
A curious sight caught the Soldier's attention. A man, blonde, exceptionally well-built, was using the fire escape to access one of the apartments. He didn't give the impression of a man breaking in, though. It was unusual enough to have him adjusting his shooting angle. Then, he heard voices, speaking—
"—I don't remember giving you a key."
"You really think I'd need one? My wife kicked me out."
The conversation wafted over to him from across the roof, courtesy of his enhanced hearing. The first man, he wasn't certain he knew, though he felt as though he should. The second he definitely knew was Fury. Target identified.
You will miss from this angle, Soldier.
"I don't miss," He replied to that voice in his head, wishing he could banish it entirely. The conversation in the apartment continued, with him only half-listening; listening enough to gauge the locations of Fury and the other man in the room.
You will miss from this angle, Soldier.
"Stop." The Barrett creaked again as he adjusted it against his shoulder. Fury wasn't going to be so tactically unaware as to step in front of a window. That was fine. The rifle was high-power enough that it should have no issue punching through an old building like this. He'd just need to centre his shots perfectly.
You will miss from this angle, Soldier.
"Just... My friends." Fury said. The Soldier lined up the scope on the wall between two windows.
"Is that what we are?" The man asked.
"That's up to you."
You will miss from this angle, Soldier.
The Winter Soldier squeezed the trigger three times. And he didn't miss.