Chapter Text
The Girl From Graz
A cold hand closed around Charlotte Lehmann's throat, dragging her from an uneasy sleep. What unsettled her wasn't the act itself, but how accustomed her body had become to it. Habit had a cruel way of reshaping horror into routine.
Strange, what the body could adapt to, given the right circumstances.
The medic's thumb pressed along the hollow of her pulse, his touch impersonal and precise. Fog clung to the rims of his spectacles, muting the calculation in his eyes. He could have been counting the beats in a pianist's metronome, rather than gauging the fragile rhythm beating beneath her skin.
"Still alive," he murmured more to himself than to her, his voice as flat as the pencil scraping against his clipboard. The faint squeal of graphite marked the sound of her existence before he stepped aside, already moving to the next cot, to the next patient—prisoner—to be awakened.
Every morning unfolded in the same repetitive sequence. A line of cots. The soft shuffle of boots. The clipped murmurs of record‑keeping. The living were catalogued beside the dead. It had long since stopped feeling extraordinary, like something out of a terrible novel or silent film.
Today, the ward stank of scorched metal, old antiseptic, and the damp sweetness of fear. No bleach could strip that scent from the air. Charlie blinked rapidly until the world steadied again, the outline of the manacle across her wrist coming into view. Each link of the chain gleamed dull under the light. They kept them all chained to their bedposts, in the night. Five feet of freedom, measured precisely.
It was challenging to think of escape when you couldn't move more than a man's length in any given direction.
Her throat burned, though not from thirst. It was a reminder of dreams that vanished the moment she woke, things she had seen in her mind's eye that had made her scream herself hoarse in the night. Not remembering what they were was a small mercy.
Pushing the blanket aside, Charlie sat up as far as the restraint allowed, the headboard's chill seeping through her spine. Across the rows, others stirred. Some woke with faint groans and sudden jerks under the grey sheets. Others, not at all. Guards drifted between beds, lifting the still bodies that would not rise again.
The sound of metal scraping against metal followed them out. Then the ward settled, heavy with breath and silence. Here, death was a housekeeping matter, noted down and removed before the next round began.
Nothing more than an inconvenience to be managed. Nazis are nothing if not efficient, in all things.
During her first week here—months ago now—the man in the cot beside Charlotte had been dead three days before anyone realized he had stopped breathing. The memory clung to her, preserved in the sterile chill of the ward. That was when they had begun the habit of it, this daily ritual at sunrise, tallying the living from the dead.
She was never as fortunate as those whose hearts had given out. Her body still refused to surrender. Two days ago, the boy who had occupied the neighbouring bed—a young, fellow Austrian by the name of Hans—had died during the night. Since then, the cot had remained bare, its stripped mattress pale as bone. She often caught her eyes drifting toward it, drawn by a quiet, treacherous envy.
"Subject Seventeen‑C."
The familiar voice snapped through the muted clatter of the ward. Charlie looked up. Dr. Reinhardt stood at the foot of her bed, mask pulled to his throat, gloves white and ready. They called him 'the Vicar', because he moved among the dying with a priest's calm detachment, murmuring his orders like benedictions.
"Preparation," he said. "Dr. Zola wants you conscious this time."
That should've sent a cold lick of fear down her spine. At one time, it might have, but fear had long since learned to lie still in her chest. Charlie had made space for it the same way she had for hunger, pain, and the hand at her throat each morning. It simply existed, and she moved through it.
The guards unfastened her chains. The release came with a dull clink that marked her as free only in name. She slid her legs over the cot, bare feet touching the tiles, the cold rising through her skin. No shoes, another precaution. The thin linen uniform she wore—white shirt, loose trousers—did nothing to guard against the draft. Once, she might have been scandalized at the sight of herself dressed like a man. Now, she only wished her pants were made of a thicker fabric.
She stood. The sound of her steps joined the metallic hum of the room; carts rolling, orders murmured, the scrape of bed frames. The ward stretched wide and severe, rows of cots aligned with military precision, two deep on each side. The air hung heavy with disinfectant and exhaustion. Lightbulbs swung slightly from their cords overhead, casting dull circles on the floor.
There was no privacy here, no corner untouched by watchful eyes. The place resembled a barracks emptied of spirit—its soldiers stripped of purpose, its silence filled only by the rhythm of survival.
One grew accustomed to that, too, the unrelenting scrutiny, the way eyes followed her every motion. Always being seen. Never a single moment to herself. Charlotte's cot sat in the row nearest the central aisle, furthest from the walls, close to the rear of the ward. The same bed she'd been chained to since the spring, when she first arrived here. Her corner of the world measured six paces long and two wide and was forever under observation.
Dr. Reinhardt moved into place beside her, his shadow long against the tiled floor. He served as her escort into the depths below, though his presence was largely ceremonial now. Charlie knew the ritual too well, by now. Walk the corridors. Try not to flinch. Let Zola play his games. Get fed if you're lucky. Shower, if you're even luckier. Return to the ward. Sleep. Try not to dream.
The cycle turned endlessly, a loop of bleak hours strung together until days lost their names and time lost its meaning.
Yet something about today carried an unease that prickled beneath her skin. The air seemed charged, dense with expectation. And she didn't like new. She had learned to distrust change here; novelty rarely brought anything but new and interesting ways to feel pain.
The tension grew audible halfway down the corridor. A sudden bark of English shattered the rhythm of their footsteps, followed by a dull, meaty thud—flesh colliding with steel. It was no clatter of dropped instruments or the hollow clang of a gurney. The sound had weight behind it. The kind of impact that bent metal and drew blood.
Reinhardt's stride faltered, almost imperceptibly. His posture held, but his head tilted a fraction toward the noise, curiosity flickering like static behind his lenses.
"Ah. The new intake." The doctor murmured, his voice detached yet still fond. "They are... spirited."
New intake. Charlie kept her face carefully blank at that.
They turned the corner into the main artery of the laboratory wing, and the air thickened, growing colder and edged with the copper sting of blood. Ahead, two guards grappled with a man near an open inspection chamber, shoving him hard against the frame; perhaps the source of the distress she'd heard earlier.
The new man was tall, built lean through the shoulders, with the wiry sort of strength that came from real training rather than conditioning. His dark hair hung damp with sweat, clinging to his brow where a fresh gash leaked a thin, gleaming line down his temple. Even at a distance, his eyes struck her—a clear, defiant blue, burning with an exhaustion that refused to concede. He fought not with the wild panic of a new prisoner, but with the grim, economical fury of a soldier who knew precisely how to hurt someone.
One guard rammed a baton into his side. The man folded slightly, a guttural sound escaping him, yet he didn't fall. His gaze flicked up, scanning the corridor, and met hers.
The contact felt physical. A shock of foreign pain exploded behind her eyes, sharp and blinding, followed by the hot trace of fury and iron at the back of her throat. It wasn't hers. It was his. For a heartbeat, she shared his body, his bruised breath, and his rage. Then the door slammed shut, metal colliding with metal, sealing him away.
Charlie's breath left her in a short, betraying gasp.
Mistake.
Making noise meant attracting attention. Dr. Reinhardt's head swivelled toward her immediately. The sound of her gasp, small as it was, had almost been louder than the slammed door in the sterile hush of the corridor.
Making noise meant attracting attention, and attracting attention meant clinical observation. Reinhardt's head turned sharply, his spectacles catching the light. His voice dropped into a tone of wonder. "Fascinating. Your sensitivity appears to be escalating, Subject Seventeen‑C. Empathic resonance, perhaps. Or sympathetic pain response." He scribbled swiftly across his clipboard, the pencil whispering in rhythm with her pulse. "Dr. Zola will want to see this. A significant development."
He didn't touch her. He never had to. The pressure of his presence was enough to move her forward. They passed the sealed door; no sound came from within. The corridor widened, swallowing them into the antechamber of the main theatre. Here, the world vibrated faintly with the hum of the generators and the mechanical sigh of respirators. The smell of bleach was so heavy it seemed to scrape against her teeth.
This was the heart of the facility, the place where the noise of the outside world could never reach.
Dr. Zola was already waiting inside, his small frame haloed by the erratic glow of equipment lining the walls. The air crackled with static from coils and electrodes, the smell of ozone biting at the back of the throat. He turned from a chalkboard layered with frantic equations and symbols, his gaze shifting between Reinhardt's eager composure and Charlotte's pale, silent face.
"She reacted to the new subject's outburst, Herr Doktor," Reinhardt reported, voice vibrating with restrained excitement. "A physical response—synchronized."
Zola's thin lips curved into a smile that was all intellect and no warmth. "Ah, meine Edelweiss. You feel the new frequency in our little orchestra, don't you?" The nickname struck her each time like a slap disguised as affection. To be likened to something delicate and pure, here, in this place, was an irony too sharp to acknowledge. Charlie's expression remained still and carefully blank.
Emboldened by her silence, Zola only stepped closer, peering at her with the same fascination he might afford an unknown organism under glass. "A soldier's anguish," he murmured thoughtfully, studying the tremor of her breath. "So raw. So potent. We shall see how your perception performs today."
Almost absently, his gloved hand gestured to the steel table in the centre of the room, where its leather restraints lay open and waiting.
She moved because there was no other option but to. The steel greeted her through the thin fabric of her uniform, cold enough to ache. That chill had become a kind of signature, the beginning of every session. Zola hummed a fragment of a Bach concerto—one Charlie couldn't quite place—as he tuned a dial, his voice untroubled and lilting, whilst an assistant, their hands trembling, arranged a tangle of electrodes beside her.
Reinhardt worked methodically. His touch was precise, devoid of cruelty yet stripped of empathy. He guided her shoulders back until she lay flat beneath the light. The glare fractured into white shards across her vision; the powder on his gloves smelled faintly of chalk.
The first strap closed around her left wrist, then the right, leather creaking as he cinched them tight. Each buckle fastened with the sound of finality. Then Zola turned again, a syringe gleaming between his fingers, the fluid inside an uncanny shade of blue that shimmered like oil on water.
"A slight adjustment to the compound today, meine Liebe," he said, voice almost tender. "An enhancement to the neural catalyst. We refine the signal, so your mind may sing at a purer pitch."
He lifted the syringe into the light, the needle catching the reflection of the electric arcs. The hum of the machinery deepened, a low vibration running through the floor and into her spine, as if the entire room were drawing a collective breath.
Zola tapped the vein in the crook of her arm with two precise fingers. His touch was almost tender, though its purpose was anything but. Charlie didn't pay it much mind. Instead, she fixed her eyes on the ceiling above, finding the same hairline crack in the tile she'd memorized over countless sessions just like this one. That narrow fissure was her tether to reality. It had held her through pain before. It would again.
Yet beneath the cold, clinical air, another thread coiled inside her—the memory of that soldier's gaze in the corridor. It was a different kind of anchor. A reminder that not everyone in this place was so broken as she was.
The needle pierced her skin with a sharp, brief sting. Then, warmth spread through her bloodstream, rippling outward until every nerve in her body seemed to hum with it. The brightness of the overhead lamps flared, then flickered in time with her heartbeat. The room wavered. Vertigo rose like a tide. The crack above her blurred, then widened.
Charlie's body jerked hard against the restraints. The hum of the machinery dissolved into vibration, a frequency that no longer came from outside her but from within. The crack in the ceiling wasn't merely a crack; it was a fissure out into the world, and through it poured a torrent of sensations that were not her own.
Snow. Endless white stretching to the horizon. Wind slicing the air with a feral cry. Cold so pure it burned. The sharp taste of iron and pine. A man's face materialized in the storm—pale, fierce, and desperate—his features distorted by the sweep of snow. A metal hand, gleaming dully, reaching... Not for her? No. But there was falling. A long, silent descent into white nothingness.
The images were sharper and more visceral than any she'd experienced before. They weren't just seen; they were felt. The crushing impact of the fall echoed in her own bones, a pain so deep it vibrated through her ribs. A name rose from the storm, formed in the space between thought and breath.
Bucky!
The vision broke apart.
Air rushed back into her lungs as she found herself once more on the table, body trembling, vision fractured by tears and light. Zola leaned over her, lenses magnifying his eyes into hungry orbs. His excitement filled the room.
"Remarkable!" He crowed. "The synaptic firings were off the chart." He turned to Reinhardt, his accent thickening with exhilaration. "Did you see the coherence?" Reinhardt's pencil scratched furiously, recording everything.
But Charlie barely heard them. The cold from the vision still clung to her skin, that phantom bite of snow sinking deeper than any draft in the room. The echo of that distant, desperate cry still resounded through her skull, fading, and then returning in uneven waves.
Zola leaned close enough that she could see the sheen of sweat on his temple. His voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. "You see, Edelweiss? You are no longer merely a subject. You are becoming a window. And soon, we will learn to point you wherever—and whenever—we wish."
The straps loosened with a series of clicks. Hands steadied her as she pushed herself upright. Her limbs felt impossibly heavy, her pulse still mismatched to the rhythm of the world. Zola's words filtered through the fog in her mind one by one until the meaning settled in her gut.
A window.
That was what HYDRA wanted all along—a human aperture through which to spy, to conquer, and to control. A way to see the world through her far-seeing eyes, because it wasn't just the future she witnessed, but the past and the present, too.
Window.
That word summoned ghosts she could never bury. Her parents' faces, blurred by memory; her brother Leo's small hands clutching hers the morning they were torn apart. The sound of boots, the shouted orders, the cold, efficient cruelty of it. All because she had been different. All because her mother had called her gift a blessing from God.
It hadn't felt like a blessing when she had witnessed the Anschluss before it had come to pass, when she warned her father of it, and he laughed it off. Right until the morning he had stood in the street, watching soldiers raise the red-white-black swastika over the city of Graz. And it didn't feel like a blessing now, either, as the weight of Zola's fascination pressed down on her chest.
Her hands still trembled. The last of the vision tremors moved through her fingers like an aftershock. Zola and Reinhardt were talking, their voices a hum she didn't try to follow. The word window echoed between them, circling like a trapped insect.
Instead, Charlie's eyes drifted to the tray beside the table. The syringe lay there, empty, its needle glinting faintly beneath the harsh light. The iridescent residue of that blue compound clung to the glass. That was her future, contained in a few lingering drops. Her mind, her memories, and her very soul reduced to a tool. A lens for Zola's ambition, focused wherever his curiosity chose to look.
The cold inside her settled deep, an immovable glacier behind her ribs.
"Rest now, meine Edelweiss," Zola soothed. His tone carried an imitation of warmth, almost paternal, as he patted her shoulder. "You have performed exceptionally well today. The data we have gathered is invaluable, as it always is."
The words stung because they weren't meant for her. His praise belonged to the experiment, not the woman beneath it. The scientist's voice reached the air, not the soul; he spoke to a phenomenon, a curiosity, a subject whose humanity was incidental. She was the window, nothing more.
Reinhardt stepped forward and extended a hand to help her down, expression smooth and unrevealing behind the fogged lenses of his spectacles. She refused the gesture, sliding off the table under her own strength. Her knees wobbled but held. The floor's cold met her bare feet again, grounding her in its familiarity.
The walk back blurred into a corridor of light and hum, a procession through sterile air and the whisper of machinery. Somewhere beneath that monotone beat, the echo of a name refused to fade. Bucky. It reverberated softly through her head, an ember from the vision still smouldering behind her eyes.
As they passed the cell where the American soldier had been taken, her gaze drifted toward the sealed door. It remained silent, heavy with the stillness of metal. Yet, deep in her chest, she sensed something—a pulse, faint but present, as though the air itself carried a taut vibration from within that confined space. The resonance brushed against her senses like the edge of a thought.
A window, Zola had called her. But a window allowed sight in both directions, didn't it? So, maybe someone was finally looking back.
Or, perhaps, she was finally losing her mind. Would that be so bad, if she were?
Madness had lost its terror long ago, too, after all.
By the time she returned to the ward, it felt different. The despair remained, steeped into the walls, but beneath it lay a thread of tension that hadn't been there before. Guards stood close together near the entrance, their usual indifference replaced by stiffness, their eyes sharp and alert.
The clinical wards were the deepest parts of Kreischberg, like a secret HYDRA kept hidden from itself. Men above toiled in their factories to produce their strange alien weapons, whilst the real work took place here, in the dark and silent night.
Her cot waited with its usual, meagre offerings—a tin bowl of thin gruel and a small heel of black bread, the steam already dying in the chill. Reinhardt oversaw a guard refastening the shackles around her wrist and ankle, his attention already shifting elsewhere. The man clicked the last lock into place. Metal against metal.
Then Reinhardt turned and left without another word.
The sound of his departing footsteps faded into the hum of the ward, and Charlie sat back, spoon untouched, the phantom taste of snow still lingering on her tongue.
The gurney beside hers had been remade while she'd been gone, she noticed dully, the sheets crisp and white against the grime-streaked floor. Someone new would occupy it soon. The realization sat in her stomach like a stone, making her appetite wither into nonexistence.
Still, she forced herself to try. Sitting on the edge of her cot, Charlie pulled the tray into her lap, the chain at her wrist giving a soft metallic clink. The gruel was lukewarm, the bread hard enough to scrape her gums, but she lifted the spoon anyway. That was when the sound came; a shuffle of boots, and a sharp order barked at the doorway.
Two guards entered, hauling the American soldier from before between them. His movements were controlled, each step deliberate, his jaw clamped tight. The cut above his brow had deepened into a shadowed bruise. His eyes, bright and assessing, swept across the ward, cataloguing every cot, every shackle, every face. When his gaze passed over her, it caught for the briefest moment before moving on—impersonal, clinical, as if he were measuring the terrain of a new and unexpected battlefield.
Steering him, the guards guided him toward the empty cot beside her own. He took the shove without resistance, the force dispersing through him like water hitting stone. One of the guards gestured to the bed, a sharp, wordless command.
"You expect me to sleep there?" His accent was unmistakably American, and English was most certainly his mother tongue, though exhaustion made his voice rougher than it no doubt was. "After you dragged the last guy out feet first?"
The larger of the two guards grunted at that, his reply a mangled echo of the same language tinged with German. "Sit. Or don't. No difference to me."
The soldier didn't move. The tension in his stance weighed on the air between them. Up close, he was taller than she'd first guessed him to be—broad through the shoulders, his frame lean but coiled with restrained strength. The threadbare uniform clung to him awkwardly, too small across the chest. He looked like a man trying to fit into someone else's life.
The guards exchanged a silent look, bored with the standoff. One stepped forward, grabbed his left wrist, and snapped the manacle shut around it with a sharp clank. The sound echoed off the tiles. Then they turned, their boots fading into the hum of the corridor.
He remained standing, his body taut, his eyes tracking the door long after it closed. The faint tremor of restrained fury hung in the air like static, and Charlie could still feel it vibrating somewhere deep behind her ribs. Finally, he let out a slow breath and sat on the edge of the mattress, the springs groaning in protest.
When the guards finally drifted out of earshot, Charlie shifted on her cot, pulling her legs up to sit cross-legged. The chain rattled against the iron post as she regarded the new arrival. Her gaze slid from the untouched bowl of gruel to the man beside her.
"Amerikanisch?" She asked him softly in German, trying to confirm her suspicions. It had been weeks since any new prisoners had arrived from the Allied front, and the Americans were rarer still. If one had turned up now, it meant something had changed out there. And in Kreischberg, information like that was the most valuable currency there was.
His head snapped toward her at the sound of her voice. The movement was quick, almost predatory, his eyes narrowing as they focused on her. There was no warmth in that look, only a guarded, analytical sharpness. He'd clearly understood the German word.
"Brooklyn," he said at last, in a low rumble. The single word carried an unmistakable pride that cut clean through the sterile air. He didn't elaborate and didn't offer a name. His gaze dipped briefly to the shackle on his wrist, then to hers. "You speak English?"
The question caught her off guard for a moment. "Some," she answered haltingly, switching languages with care. The English felt foreign in her mouth, clumsy and unfamiliar, though her mother had insisted she learn it. Leo had always been better. The thought of him came like a bruise pressed too hard.
"Brooklyn," she repeated, frowning slightly as she stirred the thin gruel with her spoon. "That is America?"
Something flickered across his expression—a hint of humour or disbelief, perhaps—there and gone almost as soon as it appeared. "Yeah," he said, a faint smirk ghosting across his lips. "Brooklyn is America."
His eyes, still ice-bright and unyielding, held hers for a long moment, as if searching for an answer to a question she hadn't asked. "You picked a hell of a place for a language lesson, sweetheart." He commented, then.
The word landed oddly in the space between them. It wasn't cruel, just misplaced, the echo of a world that didn't exist here. Charlie's nose wrinkled faintly, her tone dry when she muttered. "Then you are American." She couldn't understand why he hadn't just said 'yes' to her initial question, if that had been the case.
He huffed at that, but didn't see fit to try to clarify again. The faintest shadow of a smile lingered before his features hardened again.
Leaning forward slightly, the soldier perched his forearms on his knees, the metal of his cuff scraping lightly against the bedframe. "What is this place?" He asked quietly. "They pulled us off the line in Italy. Said we were headed to a transfer camp. But this sure as hell ain't one."
Only about half of his words landed cleanly in Charlie's mind. She understood English better than she spoke it, but some of the particulars were lost on her still. "Italy," she repeated. Then she shook her head faintly, as if that single word explained everything and nothing all at once.
She finally gave up on the meal in favour of the conversation, setting the tray aside and folding her hands in her lap. Italy. So something had happened, after all. The front was shifting. The outside world still moved, even if Kreischberg stood frozen in time.
"Gibt es noch mehr von euch? Ah—" She winced, not realizing she'd switched back to German. "—more Americans, coming here?"
The soldier watched her switch between the languages, his expression unreadable. "Yeah. Some." His hands flexed, the tendons taut beneath his skin. "Most of the 107th Infantry Division. Or what's left of it. They got us near Azzano." The next words came quieter and sharper: "You didn't answer me. What is this place? What do they do here?"
There was something in his tone that made her chest tighten—a thread of urgency woven through with anger. A man used to protecting others, now stripped of the ability to do so. He leaned even closer, lowering his voice until it was almost a whisper.
"You've been here a while," the soldier pressed. "You know. So tell me, please."
A muscle in Charlie's jaw twitched. She opened her mouth, but before the words could form, another voice answered for her, rough and darkly amused.
"You, my friend, are in hell."
Both turned toward the sound. It was Pavel. He stood across the narrow aisle, his hand chained, but arms crossed, as far as his restraint could allow. His expression held the same sardonic calm it always did, a soldier's humour stretched thin by survival.
Next to Charlie, Pavel was the ward's other constant. The second-longest survivor of what Zola designated Block C, but what they all simply called the ward. A Czech partisan, captured somewhere along Austria's southern border, he had arrived a week after she did, when the air had still smelled faintly of spring instead of bleach and blood.
He hadn't died under Zola's first round of experiments. That minor miracle had been enough to earn Charlie's guarded trust. And, over time, they had formed a fragile kind of camaraderie—one built on shared endurance and the unspoken understanding that neither of them was entirely alone in their survival.
It helped immensely that Pavel spoke fluent German. So many of the men brought here were from the Allies, so their understanding of her language was limited to 'heil Hitler', 'Kraut' and 'guten tag'. Having someone else she could properly converse with—and, more importantly, translate—had proven to be a genuine lifeline.
Pavel's flinty eyes shifted from the American to her, his voice even as he slipped into German. "Es klingt, als hätten sie ein ganzes regiment gefangen genommen." (It sounds like they captured an entire regiment.)
The soldier's gaze flicked between them, narrowing slightly at the word regiment—likely the only one he recognized—but Charlie understood the full weight of it. Her stomach sank.
There was an entire regiment of men here now? That explained Zola's near-rapture earlier. A new wave of prisoners meant fresh material—fresh data—to replace what Kreischberg had already burned through.
She lowered her voice, turning to Pavel. "Werden die Amerikaner nach ihnen suchen?" (Will the Americans come looking for them?) The question slipped out before she could stop it, the trace of hope in her tone one she wished she could conceal.
If so many had been taken, surely someone would notice they were gone. Surely, the world outside still kept count of its missing. Perhaps the Allies would launch some sort of a rescue mission, to save them?
Pavel's expression merely darkened, the faint lines around his eyes deepening. He shook his head slowly. "HYDRA ist nicht dumm. Sie werden sie in Geheimhaltung bringen, wie alle anderen." (HYDRA isn't stupid. They'll keep it quiet, like all the others.) His hand dragged through his greying hair, leaving it standing in uneven tufts. "Aber so viele Männer... Es wird schwer zu verbergen sein." (But so many men... It will be hard to hide.)
He exhaled and switched back to English, the accent thickening his voice. "They will not come looking, my friend," Pavel explained to the soldier. "Not here. This place does not exist on any map the outside world sees. We are ghosts, already."
The American absorbed that without a word. He didn't flinch, didn't move, but the muscle in his jaw tightened until it looked carved from stone. His gaze drifted past them, sweeping the ward—rows of cots, the skeletal men chained to them, and the guards posted like statues by the door. The weight of comprehension seemed to press down on him until his shoulders squared against it.
"Okay," he said at last; not an acceptance, but something close to it. "Then what do they want?" His eyes returned to Charlie, blue and steady. "With us? With all of this?"
There was no room to dodge the question now. No avoiding it. Charlie studied him, taking in the solid lines of his frame, the defiant set of his mouth, and the kind of presence that drew attention without trying.
"You are... special?" She ventured, before glancing to Pavel, brow furrowing. "Ich weiß nicht, wie ich es sagen soll." (I don't know how to say it.) She admitted.
Pavel merely nodded, catching her meaning, and shifted his gaze to the soldier. "She asks if there is something unique about you, my friend. Something that might interest the doctors." He supplied on her behalf, easily slipping into the role of interpreter.
Charlie inclined her head in agreement, eyes still on the man beside her.
The soldier's gaze sharpened on Charlie, flickering with something unreadable in those blue depths. Surprise, perhaps, or a soldier's instinctive wariness at being singled out like this.
"Special?" He repeated, tasting the word as though it belonged to someone else. "No. I'm a sergeant. Just infantry. Nothing special unique about that, unless you count getting captured as a talent, in which case, yeah, I am."
Pavel let out a short, dry sound that might once have been laughter. "A funny man, very good. Well, we are all special here, in our own way, my friend. Or, we are made to be." His gaze flicked toward Charlie. "Our friend here, Charlie—she sees things. Things that have not yet happened. Or that are happening somewhere else. It makes her valuable to them. And so, she is here." He didn't elaborate on them, but the set of his jaw told the rest.
The soldier's eyes followed his line of sight to her. His expression changed, cautious detachment sharpening into assessment. "Is that so?" He asked, voice lowered, the tone soft but undeniably curious.
Charlie inclined her head once. "Yes," she murmured, suddenly feeling quite small under the weight of his gaze.
"What kind of things?" He pressed. "What exactly do you see?"
Before she could find the words to answer that impossible question, a shadow fell across the end of his cot. Dr. Brandt stood there, clipboard pressed tight against her chest. The usual jitter present in her was absent today, replaced by a brittle, contained tension. Two guards loomed at her shoulders, impassive, boots squared.
Brandt was always the one who came for new arrivals. Charlie suspected Zola and Reinhardt liked the illusion of gentleness that a woman's presence provided. It rarely worked. It certainly wasn't working now. The soldier's posture stayed locked, his every muscle ready for resistance.
"James Buchanan Barnes," Dr. Brandt addressed him, her voice clipped and tense. "Dr. Zola will see you now. You are to come with me, at once."
The soldier, James, didn't move at first. His gaze held Charlie's, steady and unreadable, the silence between them carrying weight—a quiet promise that their conversation wasn't finished. Then, with deliberate calm, he stood.
He offered no resistance as the guards approached. They unfastened the shackle from the bed frame, metal clanging softly against tile, and bound his wrists behind his back in a motion so practiced it bordered on choreographed. That was new; he must've done something to warrant that kind of treatment.
So he'd already made an impression. Poor luck, for him.
Despite the restraints, his shoulders stayed squared, chin lifted, every line of him wound tight with that same coiled defiance he'd shown since the moment they dragged him in. As the guards led him down the aisle, he turned once, looking back over his shoulder. Not at the soldiers escorting him. Not at Pavel. At her.
Charlie met his gaze. Her expression stayed carefully composed, a mask she'd worn for months, but something in her chest lurched as she watched him vanish through the double doors at the end of the ward. Only when they swung shut behind him, did she allow the smallest breath to escape, her shoulders easing by a fraction. She glanced toward Pavel then, grateful for the reprieve of her own language.
"Do you think he will live?" She asked him softly. It felt like such a foolish question, but one she couldn't help but ask.
Pavel's eyes lingered on the closed doors, his face set in stone. "He is strong," he replied in her mother tongue. A sigh followed, weighted with too many names and faces gone before. "But, that is not always enough. Not here."
He sat back, the chain at his wrist rattling faintly. "Zola has a weakness for soldiers," Pavel continued, his voice still kept low. To speak higher than a whisper was to court unwanted attention. "He sees them as more interesting material." His eyes found hers again, and whatever light they'd once held was long gone. "It could keep him alive longer. Or, it could kill him faster."
No more needed to be said. They both knew the pattern too well—the strong ones, the defiant ones, the ones who dared to resist, those were the ones Zola liked to push them hardest. To see how far a body could bend before it broke. Sometimes that stubborn spark earned another day of breath. Sometimes, it only slowed the dying.
Charlie exhaled, the sound caught somewhere between resignation and grief. Her gaze dropped to the bowl of gruel on her lap. The surface had cooled to a pale skin, the smell turning her stomach. She couldn't force it down any longer. With a slight movement, she slid the tray across the rough blanket toward Pavel in a silent offering.
He hesitated for only a moment, then nodded once and accepted it without a word, but with a quiet nod of gratitude. He understood and didn't try to refuse the gift. Because he knew exactly what she was feeling, even without an empath's gifts.
The anxiety, the dread, and the constant, gnawing fear that came with every selection, every new arrival, and every reminder of Zola's insatiable curiosity...
"You should try to rest," he finally murmured, dragging the spoon through the thin gruel. "While you still can, Charlie."
Rest was nothing more than a hollow word here, but she obeyed the sentiment if not the command. Stretching out on the cot, she fixed her eyes on the ceiling, the burn and hum of the dim lightbulbs a familiar thing. Her thoughts drifted, towards the snow and to that voice that had cried out through her vision, sharp and desperate.
Bucky.
That name echoed again inside her skull, throbbing a heartbeat. Bucky. She sat up abruptly, her pulse hammering. Bucky. Her gaze snapped toward the cot beside hers, to the space he'd filled mere minutes before.
Bucky...
...Buchanan?
The revelation struck her clean through her exhaustion. The premonition, the one that Zola's serum had induced—the blizzard, the fall, the metallic glint of an outstretched hand—it hadn't been random, like she'd first assumed it to be. It had been him. She had only seen it after laying eyes on him for the first time, after all.
Why on earth hadn't she connected the dots sooner?
The man who had stood there mere moments ago, all sharp angles and defiant blue eyes, a soldier through and through, was the very same one she had seen tumbling through the blizzard. The same one whose bones had splintered beneath her skin in that vision. She had felt his fall as if it were her own.
Her fingers tightened around the thin blanket, the fabric bunching beneath her fists. The images struck her with renewed clarity—snow, the blinding white, and the metallic gleam of an arm that couldn't have been made of flesh. That voice, crying out his name so desperately. It wasn't just a vision of some distant, abstract future. It was his future. But then, how did the other pieces fit? The metal arm? Who had called his name? Where, or when, was this man destined to die?
Pavel noticed the sudden stillness that had seized her. "Charlie?" His voice cut softly through the hum of the ward. "What is it?"
She didn't answer him; she couldn't. The words wouldn't come. Her throat locked, air catching halfway between a breath and a sound. She stared at the empty cot beside hers, the space that James Buchanan Barnes had occupied minutes before, and the terror inside her settled into something cold and absolute.
Zola hadn't merely turned her into a window. He had forced her to read the last page of a story before it had even begun.
Now Charlie knew, with awful certainty, that she had just looked into the eyes of a dead man walking.
And there was nothing she could do to stop it.