Unconscious
The second time you wake up that morning (or is it midday..., perhaps even afternoon?) you’re not in your apartment anymore. Instead you find yourself tied to a chair in a dark room in some kind of warehouse. It’s quiet, aside from the pounding inside your head. An eerie feeling is settling over you, becoming more intense as your mind tries to grasp what happened, how you ended up here. Your first instinct is to scream but there’s duct tape covering your mouth. You shut your eyes again, wishing for this to be a terrible nightmare.
You try to wiggle out of your bounds, unsuccessfully. Whoever dragged you here knows stuff about bondage and you’re too much of a weakling to get them off anyways.
Panic starts settling in and it all only becomes worse once you hear footsteps echoing from afar.
It must be him. Zemo probably discovered the FBI were onto him and now needs to get rid of the woman who made the mistake of running into him. But why not just kill you immediately? Why drag you to a dodgy warehouse? He seems to not care about the loss of innocent lives anyways, considering the attack on the UN building.
Your thoughts are interrupted by two man coming out of the shadows. Both of them most definitely not being Zemo but perhaps associates? They look quite scary – that’s for sure. Tall, bulky and extremely angry looking.
You begin to squirm in your chair once again. Not quite sure what to hope for, even if you ran, there would be no guaranty that you could get out alive.
“So, the bitch finally woke up.”
One of the men, the slightly shorter one with the dirty blond hair huffed.
The other man steps up towards you, his finger already on the left end of the duct tape covering your mouth.
“Listen now, it’s of no use to anybody if you scream once I remove this. We’re in the middle of nowhere. Nobody’s going to hear you and we simply want to ask you a few questions. Understood?”
You can’t bear looking into his eyes, your whole body is shaking while you slightly nod. Tears already burning in your eyes. You wanted to throw up, or pee your pants or whatever the fuck people do when they are scared shitless.
Ripping off the duct tape is painful but if only you knew how much more painful this whole “questioning” would become.
“Alright. If you want this to be over quickly, be a good girl and answer me this simple question:”
The taller one inquires while scooting another chair in front of you. The other man is off somewhere out of the corner of your eye, the only thing you can make out is water running into a bucket and the air becoming even more humid than before.
“Where is Helmut Zemo?”
Your eyes widen. Not understanding this situation at all. Were they not here in duty of the Baron? Were they FBI as well? The bad cops? The really bad, desperate ruthless ones?
You shake your head no. Frantically trying to explain that you had no idea where he was. That you were just a normal, boring person who had a 9 to 5 and never did anything illegal in her life, besides maybe underage drinking in high school.
You simply ran into Helmut Zemo without even knowing and you already got questioned by the FBI. You knew about the man as much as the media would report on him and you had zero ties to the avengers or anybody associated with him.
You could tell the man opposite of you was annoyed. Shaking his head and shushing you.
“See, we know the FBI already questioned you and we don’t work like the FBI. We don’t need those rules. And you won’t be able to pull off your I-know-nothing bullshit with us. You either tell us his whereabouts or this is going to be a looooong night, darling.”
That’s when the other man appeared again. Carrying a huge bucket with water. You gulped as he untied your legs from the chair, forcing you to your knees, which sent a wave of pain through your body as they made contact with the cold, hard concrete floor.
You’ve read about water torture and all you wanted to do - in prospect of what you feared was about to happen - was scream and cry for your mum.
“I swear. Please I swear that I do not have any connection to Zemo. I don’t know him, I haven’t even talked to him. I bumped into him on accident. Plea...”
You begged but to no avail as suddenly a sharp pain shot through your already aching head as you were pulled by your hair and forcefully dipped underwater. You didn’t have any time to get air into your lungs, so water got into every available opening in your face, burning up your nose and your windpipes. At least the desperation to breath distracted you from how cold the water was.
After too long but probably about only half a minute your head was pulled out again and immediately the questions shot out of the man again, while you were desperately trying to breath and at the same time not suffocate on the water you swallowed. Water in your ears made everything sound dull but you could still clearly tell the questions were still about Helmut Zemo. Only this time you didn’t even manage to properly reply in the negative before your head was underwater again.
This continued on for quite a while. Everything hurt and burnt and every time your head was out of the water you could feel hot tears on your face while sobs and violent coughs were wrecking through your body. This was worse than anything you had ever experienced in your life. You didn’t know what to do. You didn’t have any information. If you did you would give it away immediately. You just wanted the pain and suffering to go away. You wanted it to stop. To go home and hide forever and never set a foot out of your apartment again.
You could tell the two men were becoming more and more frustrated with you as well. Throwing around vile curse words and yanking you even more forcefully in and out of the bucket.
You stopped counting how many times you got dunked but at one point the taller man must have had enough of your lack of knowledge about Zemo, so that he decided punching you right in the face might help bring your memories back. You felt blood running down your cheek and dripping into the bucket, giving the water a light pink taint.
If your head hadn’t exploded just yet, you figured now might just be a good time. You honestly just wanted to die. What did it matter anyways? You didn’t know shit about Zemo and you certainly wouldn’t recover from the trauma, if you ever made it out alive from this shithole.
At least after the forceful punch to your left eye the water torture stopped and the hand pulling up your head dropped. Like a sack of potatoes, you slumped on your side, silently wailing in a fetus position while the two men whispered to each other.
Some time passed until a kick in your rips forced you out of your pain induced delusion.
“Right darling. We’ll give you one more chance.
You tell us where the fuck Helmut Zemo is hiding and we’ll let you go.”
He knelt down in front of you, snarling into your face while forcefully holding your chin in his hands, twisting your head into an uncomfortable position.
“But…, if you don’t speak up now, we really do have no other option but to use other, more painful measures.”
The hand grabbing your chin was replaced by the barrel of a gun.
You completely froze. You knew this was it. Perhaps making something up would work but they’d find you anyways, knowing you bullshitted them and death seemed like a sweet release at this point. You wondered when the phenomena of “the light at the end of the tunnel / your life flashing behind your eyes in seconds” would set in but just as you were about to mumble that you really did not know anything and maybe plead one last time to let you go, a gunshot rang through the building.
It seemed like everything stopped for a milli-second until there was a scream from the shorter man and suddenly another gunshot.
It got unpleasantly quiet. You shut your eyes, no thoughts ran through your head except that death didn’t feel any different. The pain was still there, you still felt the cold floor under your body and you could smell the blood dripping from your face. In a way you were disappointed, you thought dying would relieve you of everything. You were never a religious person, but you did believe that death felt like floating. A numb floating, no negative feelings, yet also no positive ones. Just aimless floating.
When you once again heard steps coming towards you, you realized that perhaps you weren’t even dead. You opened your eyes just to come face to face with your kidnapper, his lifeless eyes staring right at you. He must have been shot and has fallen right in front of you.
Blood was still oozing out of his body and you could slowly feel it running towards your lying form, soaking the thin cloth of your pajamas.
The footsteps were definitely descending from somewhere now, getting closer. You decided to shut your eyes again, too afraid to see who else decided to have their way with you. You’ve already kind of made peace with the fact that you were going to die and you made the decision to simply not look into your murderer’s eyes once it happens.
The louder the footsteps became the more panic rushed through your body. It surprised you that only then an anxiety attack would overtake you. It suddenly felt hard to breath and a wave of ugly sobs rushed through your aching ribcage. You felt almost pathetic, silently stuttering “please, please, please…” over and over again.
Your ears were ringing, still abused from all the water but you picked up the sound of the new intruder dragging the dead man’s body away from you, most likely to get a better shot at you.
Your shaking from barely registered the gentle touch of a hand running over your shoulder.
“Shhh, hey…”
You opened your eyes abruptly, recognizing the deep, raspy voice with the accent even though you’ve only heard it once in your life. It was him. Definitely. In a long grey trench coat with a fur collar framing his masked face. He took off the purple disguise before continuing.
“It’s alright. You’re ok. You’re safe now.”
Helmut Zemo was kneeling in front of you, a golden gun right next to his knee. Looking down with furrowed, worried brows on your miserable, hurt form.
Your mind was still trying to make sense of it all but you came to no conclusion as you slowly drifted out of consciousness once again.