Sometimes he saw things he shouldn’t. Not in the sense of a crime scene, dead bodies piling on top of each other and blood dripping from wounds that sealed their fate. No, that was his normal. The forbidden things he saw came in his sleep or when he couldn’t stop his mind from drifting while he waited for his target to move into the window of sight of the scope of his sniper rifle. He caught glimpses of laughter, of paint-stained hands reaching out and gently cupping his face. He saw a bony chest trying desperately to pump air into not fully functioning lungs while his own hand rested on an equally bony back. He saw an already at least twice broken nose bleeding, a bloody smile accompanying words he couldn’t recall. He felt like the words would’ve been of annoyance or pride or anger, but never of cruelty.
Sometimes there was more.
Sometimes he got so, so close to hearing the words those pink lips said.
Sometimes he got close to something he feared could be remembering.
Once on a mission, he saw a tall brunette man dancing with his blonde partner and he couldn’t place his finger on why there was a pang in his chest when he realized that the blonde partner was a woman and not a tiny man with strong eyes.
Those eyes haunted him in his sleep.
When he woke up with this crushing pressure of fear in his chest it was usually because he had dreamed about those eyes looking up at him and losing their light, turning lifeless and dull while a metal hand crushed someone’s throat.
He didn’t have a single memory of ever meeting a man with blonde hair and blue eyes like the ones in his dreams.
What he did remember was once asking his current handler who the tiny man with the big spirit was. He still bore the marks of the resulting punishment on his back. Since then, he kept the glimpses of the man to himself.
Every time he got taken out of cryo, his first thought was something along the lines of “I hate the cold, he’s gonna get sick again, what if he doesn’t make it this time, I’m so cold, I won’t be able to warm him up, please god let him live-“ and that train of thought always got stopped by cruel Russian words and more violence than anybody should ever live through.
Violence and compliance were all he knew.
It was all he was.
But sometimes…
Sometimes he felt like his body had known gentle touches and warmth before.
Before…
There was this longing in his chest, longing for something he couldn’t identify.
He didn’t make the mistake of telling his handlers about those things.
Weapons didn’t feel, didn’t long for something and he was their greatest weapon, the “fist of Hydra”. His work shaped the century, they said. They told him that he was doing all of this for the greater good and that he helped making the world a better place. Yes, what he did was brutal and usually resulted in a lot of death. But even the best things had to be built on blood and bones and flesh that got mended into newer and better things.
Sometimes he got the feeling of wrongness when they told him what had to be done.
But it had to be done.
And so he did it.
A tiny voice in his head told him that violence couldn’t be the right thing to do. A voice that sounded and felt like sun-warmed skin and soft wind in his hair and a gentle press of lips against his left collarbone. The voice sounded and felt like home.
Whenever the electric shocks took away that voice, he felt nothing but emptiness afterwards.
He couldn’t remember what was wrong per se and what his heart was aching for, but he knew that it was important.
Almost as important as keeping his mouth shut and only answering in perfect Russian whenever they directly addressed him. He couldn’t shake the feeling that the blankness of his mind and getting called “Asset” was wrong.
Just like he couldn’t shake the habit of glancing down dark alleys as he passed them. Or the feeling of the biting cold that sat deep in his bones and of a big and strong body wrapping itself around him, a steady heart beating against his back. Big hands gently stroking his sides up and down, calm words murmured into the silence of the night, the confusion of his own body having to adjust to someone else’s that had so rapidly changed.
Big hands still being big, their touch still gentle and sometimes their skin still darkened by smudges of charcoal.
The Soldier had never touched drawing coals in his life but somehow he seemed to remember his own hands carefully washing charcoal stains out of thread-bare shirts with a left hand not out of metal but of flesh.
Glimpses of that strong body always came accompanied with confusion and fear. So, so much fear. Whenever he remembered that wide set of shoulders clad in red, white and blue, he felt a deep-ingrained fear. A fear for that man and of what his handlers would do to the Soldier for remembering him.
He also felt hate because in his mind, the strong man equaled pain.
The Soldier was good at enduring pain, he could get shot and wouldn’t even make a sound, but the pain that came with the strong man with the gentle hands was so much worse than getting shot. It was all the torture he had endured so far combined, it was worse than when they had cut and ripped the remains of his left arm from his body just so they could replace it with a metal arm that pulled on his spine and lit up his nerve-endings with burning pain with every single movement.
He had gotten used to his left side being heavier, to getting hurt and tortured seemingly just for the sake of it but he would never get used to the absolute horror that got hold of his body whenever he remembered that strong man.
He always welcomed the tiny man though and his crooked nose, soft smile and blue eyes that somehow made the Soldier feel safe in the midst of all the violence and pain that the world inflicted on him and that he in return inflicted on the world.