Chapter 11
616 remained standing on the mattress, her feet still sinking into the bloodstained sheets, her body trembling. His touch still burned on her skin — not from pain, but from unexpected gentleness. He had wiped the blood from her face with a softness that didn’t match the man standing before her. And that confused her more than anything.
She looked at him, eyes brimming with tears, her voice choked.
“I… I tried,” she murmured. “Tried to be strong… but I couldn’t.”
The Winter Soldier stood where he was, unmoving before her, imposing, like a shadow carved in ice. His eyes slowly rose to meet hers. A muscle in his jaw tightened, almost imperceptibly.
“You were strong enough,” he said, his voice low and firm. “It doesn’t matter how. The mission was completed… and that’s all that needs to be reported.”
616 blinked, absorbing those words. For a moment, everything around her seemed to dissolve — the drying blood on the floor, the smell of gunpowder and sweat, the screams still echoing in her mind. Everything went silent. There was only him… and that sentence.
She didn’t know if it was comfort, a command, or an indifferent observation. But somehow, it felt like recognition. Small, rough, but real.
Her shoulders relaxed slightly. She was still trembling, her body exhausted and wounded, but now there was something inside her that resisted just a little more.
Without saying anything, with calm but not gentle movements, he wrapped his arms around her — a clumsy gesture, almost as if he still didn’t quite know how to touch someone without violence. Even so, she didn’t resist.
He lifted her into his arms and carried her out of the room, through the half-open door, and down the silent hallway. No sound except his steady footsteps on the wooden floor. 616 kept her face close to his chest, catching the faint metallic scent embedded in his dark clothes.
The Soldier pushed open the door to a room next door and stepped inside. It was a different room — clean, untouched. The bedspread was neatly stretched, spotless, and a leather armchair faced a fogged glass window. He set her down there with a certain stiffness, like someone completing a necessary task, then adjusted her coat over her shoulders with a brief, almost impatient touch.
“Stay here,” he said. His voice came out harsher than he meant, but there was still something… careful, even if poorly hidden. “I’m going to get the radio. We need to contact Hydra.”
He turned and left before she could say anything.
Alone, 616 took a deep breath. The silence of the new room felt almost surreal after the earlier chaos. Her eyes scanned the space and landed on the window. She leaned forward slightly, still feeling the throbbing pain in her chest, and then she saw it.
Snow was falling slowly outside, tinting the darkness of the night with a strange calm. The flakes gathered on the trees and the windowsill, soft, indifferent to the blood spilled in the house.
And it was only then, in that solitary moment, that she realized: he had taken her out of there. Out of the filthy room, away from the weight of what had happened. He brought her to a clean place. Not because he had to… but because he chose to.
That confused her more than any words ever could.
Time seemed to have stopped. 616 was still watching the snow when she heard firm footsteps approaching. The Soldier returned with the radio in hand and the same impassive expression as before. He stopped in front of the armchair for a second, simply watching her, as if calculating whether she had the strength to go on.
“I contacted Hydra,” he said at last, his voice low and unhurried. “They’ll be here in an hour. We need to walk to the extraction point.”
She nodded slowly, saying nothing. She was exhausted, her body still aching, but something in the way he spoke — direct, without embellishment — made her feel like she could keep going.
He turned without waiting for a response, and she stood with difficulty, pushing herself up from the armrest before following him.
As they descended the stairs, the metallic scent of blood still clung to the air. But now, walking beside the Soldier, she didn’t feel fear. She felt… a strange sense of steadiness.
The Soldier walked ahead, his eyes sweeping every corner of the hallway. Not because of any threat — he had already eliminated them all — but out of certainty. Every step was deliberate, every decision calculated. Behind him, 616 followed with short, hesitant steps, still shaken, but obedient. He had cleared the path.
When he pulled her from the room, it wasn’t just because of the blood or the stench of death. It was because he knew what she would see on the way back. Bodies sprawled across the floor, eyes wide in frozen terror, limbs twisted at impossible angles. She didn’t need to see that.
So, he led her through a different route, taking the side wing that opened straight onto the porch. No bodies on that path. Only shadows and the soft creak of the wooden floor beneath their feet.
She didn’t notice. She was too exhausted, too overwhelmed. And he preferred it that way.
There was no compassion in the Soldier’s eyes — at least, not visibly. But there was intention. And for someone like him, that meant a lot.
When they had walked far enough, the Soldier stopped. He opened a small side pouch and pulled out a remote.
616 watched in silence. She didn’t ask why. She already knew.
When he was done, he lifted his eyes to meet hers.
“No one will find what was left behind.”
She simply nodded, wrapped in the dark coat he had given her. The silence between them said more than any explanation could.
Without looking back, the Soldier slid his finger over the trigger. But he didn’t press it. Not yet.
They kept walking. Their footprints were slowly being erased by the falling snow.
And the house behind them… waited to disappear.
--
They walked in silence for over half an hour, leaving behind the isolated house deep in the forest. The snow covered their tracks almost as quickly as their feet made them. The Soldier knew exactly how far to go. He counted each step in his mind, as he always did.
When they reached a safe distance, he stopped. From his inner pocket, he pulled out the small detonator and pressed the button calmly. One second of silence… then a muffled boom filled the air. The ground trembled beneath their feet, a distant gust lifting a cloud of snow on the horizon, briefly lit by the glow of the explosion that consumed the house.
616 was exhausted. In pain. Wounded not only physically, but in places she didn’t yet know how to name. And then, like a blade slowly cutting through the fog of shock, the truth came.
She had killed.
For the first time, her hand had closed around a blade that pierced living flesh. The blood — warm, thick — still seemed to cling to her skin, even though it was no longer visible. It wasn’t just a mission. It wasn’t just survival. It was real.
She had taken a life.
The realization hit her like a freezing wave, and for a moment, the world seemed to spin around her. The weight of what she had done settled onto her already weary shoulders, dragging her further down.
Maybe it had been necessary. Maybe there had been no other choice. But the memory of the moment the knife went in — the muffled sound, the look in the woman’s eyes before she fell — all of it was now a part of her.
And there was no going back.
The tears began to fall silently. First a few, then many — messy, desperate. 616 sank to her knees right there, folding into the snow, arms wrapped tightly around her own body in a futile attempt to hold herself together. But she couldn’t. The pain broke through every barrier. She cried like a lost child, her sobs tearing through the silence of the frozen forest.
The Soldier, who had stopped a few steps ahead, turned at the sound. He froze for a moment.
He had seen breakdowns before — screams, rage, pain. But never like this. Never like that. Because, despite what Hydra wanted her to be, despite the black uniform and the number instead of a name, 616 was still just a girl.
A child.
A child who had taken a life for the first time.
Something shifted inside him — tense, uncomfortable. Part of him wanted to just move on. Say that this was it, that it was part of the job, that she’d have to learn.
But he didn’t move in that direction.
Instead, he walked over to her. He knelt down beside her, the cold snow pressing into his knee. And with movements almost hesitant, he wrapped his arms around her.
She was trembling.
"Shhh..." he murmured, awkwardly. "It’s over. It’s done."
She couldn’t stop crying, and yet she didn’t try to pull away from him. There was something in the warmth of that embrace — in the cold, impassive solidity of the Winter Soldier — that offered a strange kind of safety.
He knew he wasn’t good with words. He didn’t know how to comfort. He had never had to deal with this — with emotion. With fear. With children crying because they had done something irreversible.
And yet, he held her tight. A silent shield against the weight of the world.
"You survived, doll," he said at last, in a whisper barely audible. "And that’s what matters now."
She sobbed against him, her fists clenched into his dark coat. She didn’t answer. But she didn’t pull away either. And maybe, that was what she needed most in that moment.
The silence between them was thick, broken only by the muffled sound of snow beneath their feet and 616’s uneven breathing, still struggling under the weight of what had happened.
When he helped her to her feet, she allowed herself a question, hesitant, as if she wasn’t sure any of this was real:
“You... called me doll.”
The words came out weak, almost swallowed by the cold wind. She didn’t look at him directly, her eyes fixed on the white ground as if afraid of the answer. The Soldier turned his head slightly in her direction, but didn’t respond right away.
It was true. He had said it. A nickname — small, maybe insignificant — but one that carried an unexpected weight. It wasn’t part of protocol. It wasn’t part of Hydra’s doctrine. But he had said it.
“It’s just a nickname,” he replied, almost automatically, trying not to think too hard about why.
But she didn’t seem convinced. And the silence that followed felt heavier than before.
They walked a few more steps before she spoke again, her voice even softer, but laced with a broken innocence that tightened something in his chest.
“How... how would you call me... if I were a good girl?”
She stopped — right there in the snow — as if she couldn’t take another step without that answer.
The Soldier stopped too, looking at her. That question disarmed him. For a moment, he was no longer Hydra’s relentless executioner. There was something in 616’s touch… in the fragility of her swollen eyes, in the way her body trembled, trying to hold itself together… that lit an old spark. A memory long buried under layers of conditioning, orders, and forgetfulness.
For a moment, he wasn’t there in the snow, with the weight of a mission behind him.
He was somewhere else. A time far, far away.
A modest room, warmed by a wood-burning stove. Soft light filtered through a thin curtain. He saw himself sitting in a wooden chair — hands small, but too big for the tiny, warm bundle he was holding.
A baby.
Blue eyes, tiny fists near her face. So fragile.
He wore no uniform, carried no weapons. Just a shirt and simple pants, his hair still messy from sleep. A quiet laugh escaped his lips as the little girl squirmed, letting out sounds that weren’t quite crying.
“You’re so stubborn…” he whispered, with a tenderness almost reverent. “You’re gonna be a handful when you grow up, aren’t you, Rebecca?”
He remembered the feeling of pride, as if he were the older brother of a princess too small to understand the world. He had rocked her gently, with hands that were steady and sure. The image flickered. Fractured like glass cracking under pressure.
Rebecca.
The name echoed in the Winter Soldier’s mind with the weight of something forcibly forgotten. He didn’t know how, or why… but that baby had been important. A piece of him, from before the darkness. Before Hydra.
When his eyes opened again, the cold night wind cut through the fog of memory. He was back. With 616, in the snow. Crying. Lost.
But now… he knew the name.
And he knew what to say.
616 stood there — hair messy, eyes swollen from tears — but blue, just like in the memory.
Blue like the eyes of the child he once held, long before he became a ghost of himself.
Something in his chest tightened.
“You can be Rebecca,” he said, his voice low, hoarse, laced with a feeling he couldn’t name.
It wasn’t a conscious decision. It was instinct. A trace of humanity, trying to rise from beneath the pain and programming.
616 blinked, confused. The frozen tears on her cheeks seemed to glisten under the falling snow. She didn’t understand right away. But the name… the name wrapped around her like a warm blanket on a cold night.
And even without knowing why, she felt safer.
He, in turn, just looked away — as if he’d revealed more than he meant to. As if that name had opened a door that should never have been touched.
But it was too late.
Rebecca existed now.
And he had been the first to recognize her.