Chapter 2
“I think I’ve got something,” Sam told him a few days after he’d taken that tape home, seen some small fraction of the pain Bucky had endured. In the time since, Steve had done his best to keep up the search, but he’d felt his stomach turn every time he even looked at one of the Winter Soldier’s files. Sam didn’t seem to have the same qualms.
Of course, Sam hadn’t seen the video. Steve hadn’t even told him it existed. Sam was as determined as ever to bring down HYDRA and everyone associated with it and felt none of the guilt that Steve was struggling not to drown in after watching that horrible recording.
But now more than ever, Steve knew just how much he owed Bucky. He plastered on a smile and said, “Oh, yeah? Where are we going?”
The lead that Sam had discovered, sourced from another blip of new and suspicious digital activity, took them further east this time, all the way into the snowy Russian plains.
They touched down to initially find nothing but snow, a dark and empty field with no sign of a structure ever having been there – just a few dark signal towers, some power lines that appeared to connect to nothing. It was only when Steve stepped out of the jet and began hiking through the field in search of something, anything, and soon felt the snow turning to sludge beneath his boots that he registered anything abnormal.
“Right here,” he called to Sam, gesturing down at the metal trapdoor he’d caught sight of beneath a patch of melting snow. The entire base was underground, it seemed, and it was warm. It meant, once again, that it had been recently occupied. Steve wrapped his fingers around the heavy metal of the door and used every ounce of his strength to wrench it upwards. A ladder greeted him below, stretching down into the dark abyss of the base. With a steeling breath, Steve and Sam began to descend.
They split up, and Steve wound his way through the hallways of the base, just as dark and empty as the bases before. This facility looked like it had been abandoned for a while; doors along the hallways hung off their hinges and thick dust coated every available surface, puffing into the air in tiny clouds every time Steve took a step. Still, the strange warmth in the air, such a contrast to the freezing wind outside, told Steve there was something here worth looking for, if only he could find it.
Deep within the ground, stories below the surface of the earth, Steve finally saw it.
The abandoned offices that had populated the upper floors of the base were absent this far down. Here, Steve was met with bleak concrete walls and a vault door, reinforced to be so heavy that Steve wasn’t sure his enhanced strength would be enough to break through. Luckily, someone before him had opened it, leaving a tiny crack for him to slip through into the room beyond.
As soon as he stepped through the door, the warmth that had pervaded the rest of the building left him in a rush. The room beyond that door was colder than ice.
In the center of that room stood the warped metal bones of what must have once been a structure. It had been torn apart, lying in shattered pieces on the floor. Steve took in the bent support beams that had once fastened the object to the floor, the broken glass glinting dully in the small amount of light seeping in from outside, the heavy metal door lying just to the side of the debris field, and was struck with a cold realization.
He’d seen the cryo chamber in photos from Bucky’s files. (Seen Bucky’s face tinged a deathly blue, skin patchy and dark with frostbite, heavy ice clumping on his eyelashes and sealing his eyes shut.) He knew exactly what he was looking at now, knew exactly who would have come back here just to destroy it.
Even if he hadn’t put it together, he would have realized when he saw the nondescript black bag sitting in the center of the debris. Steve moved slowly to pick it up and open it, already knowing what he’d find inside.
The tape tucked neatly into the center pocket of the bag bore the label Asset: Corrective Strategies, 1954.
“Bucky,” Steve murmured.
He hadn’t been sure before. It had seemed halfway delusional to assume that Bucky had left that first tape specifically for him to find, but this all but confirmed it.
He still had no real evidence to go on besides feelings, but between the mysterious resurgence of new leads and the path of destruction leading Steve straight to these tapes (and maybe a bit of wishful thinking,) it was the only explanation that made sense. It almost felt as though Bucky was speaking to him. It had to be Steve’s job, then, to figure out what he was trying to say.
Ignoring the queasy dread he felt at reading the label on that tape, Steve took it with him again, shoving it into a hidden pocket in his suit.
At this point it wasn’t a question what he’d do. If Bucky was talking to him, however cryptic that communication was, he was going to listen. He smuggled the package back to his apartment in DC, closed the blinds to keep prying neighbors from seeing, and popped the tape into his video player.
The screen buzzed to life to reveal a slightly less grainy video than the one Steve had already seen. The camera zoomed in and out before focusing on, not a lab, but what looked like a cell, lit bleakly from the ceiling by a buzzing fluorescent light. A single chair sat waiting in the center of the room, unforgivingly straight-backed and metal. It clearly wasn’t the Chair, but Steve still swallowed hard, feeling the ominous atmosphere even from thousands of miles and six decades away.
With a sudden burst of sound, the door to the room swung open and man stumbled in — shirtless, arms tied behind his back, off-balance as though he’d been shoved. He was so changed from the sick and emaciated man in the previous clip that it took Steve a moment to recognize him as Bucky.
Everything about Bucky in this clip reflected the harshness of discipline. His bones were less visible, proof he’d had some nutrients forced into him, but instead of a healthy balance of muscle and fat, his body was all wiry with rabid, hungry strength. Muscles bulged in his bicep and thighs despite his cheekbones still looking hollow and starved.
The austerity was even reflected in Bucky’s hair; where it had been long in the previous snippets of video, curling around his ears the way Steve had always found so achingly endearing, it was now buzzed short. The rest of the hair from his body was shaved unnaturally clean. The indignity of it made Steve’s blood boil almost as much as the obvious physical abuse did. Bucky had loved his hair and taken such care to style it, even during the war when they were fighting long stretches behind enemy lines. The fact that it had been taken from him, on top of his arm and his freedom and the memories constituting his life, incensed Steve almost more than the rest of it combined.
Bucky staggered into the room listing heavily to one side, almost toppling leftwards toward the metal chair before managing to right himself. With what looked like a great deal of effort, Bucky turned around to bare his teeth at his captors, and Steve caught sight of the left side of his body for the first time. He felt his stomach drop. Between the last video and now, the metal arm had been attached.
The attachment site was free of bandages, indicating Bucky had had the arm for a while, but he clearly wasn’t used to moving with it. The weight of it dragged him sideways, and Steve could see his newly built muscles flexing in a fight to keep himself upright.
The guards at the door were wholly unsympathetic. Three men almost as muscular as Bucky, clad in dark HYDRA uniforms and armed with batons, crowded in on Bucky where he stood hunched in an animalistic crouch that screamed defensiveness. Bucky tried to backpedal across the room, but he was grabbed by the shoulders and thrown into the metal chair so hard it skidded backwards, nearly tipping over.
One of the guards grabbed the chair to steady it, keeping it slightly tilted back, while another grabbed Bucky by the face. Bucky’s eyes, sunken with exhaustion and a hardship Steve could hardly begin to imagine, burned as he stared into the face of his captor.
“You know you are to comply with all training exercises,” the guard said, giving Bucky’s head a rough shake. “The arm was a gift, you understand? You pay us back by doing the work we tell you. You run the training courses. You complete the target practice you are assigned. You are not to fight back. You have no right to disobey.”
Bucky glowered at him, like he was brimming with opposition but couldn’t quite put it into words. Steve was noticing a fuzzy sort of distance at the edges of his steely glare, and couldn’t help but wonder if the electroshock and memory wipes had already been brought into play.
“You ought to know by now what happens when you fight. Since apparently you do not, perhaps another lesson will suffice.”
As the guard let go of Bucky’s face and stormed away to prepare his “lesson,” Steve couldn’t shake the notion that the group bore a sickening similarity to the STRIKE team. He felt like he was looking at a 60-years-earlier embodiment of Brock Rumlow, offering slimy false smiles while he doled out violence for his own personal gain. Maybe, Steve thought bitterly, some things never changed.
The man returned with shackles open and waiting in his grip. He bent down to fasten Bucky’s ankles to the chair, grinning in mild amusement as Bucky’s feet twitched like he wanted to kick out but he was forcing himself to have some restraint.
When Bucky’s ankles were secure, his chest starting to rise and fall with that familiar quickened cadence that meant panic, the guard produced a wad of black fabric from his pocket. He gripped Bucky’s jaw with one hand, stretching it open so unnaturally far that Steve actually heard a pop echoing around the concrete cell, and shoved the fabric in. Bucky shouted on instinct, but the sound was muffled by the gag in his mouth. The guard readjusted his grip so he was forcing Bucky’s mouth shut instead, fingernails digging into the smooth skin of Bucky’s face.
Steve was starting to think that anger and heartbreak might be one and the same emotion, watching the fight in Bucky’s eyes be slowly overtaken by helplessness. He wasn't sure he’d ever seen his Bucky looking so lost.
“Last chance, Soldier. Are you ready to comply?”
Bucky’s lips twitched around the gag, a conflicted expression flickering across his face. Steve didn’t know whether to will him to keep fighting or beg him to spare himself.
It didn’t matter. Bucky couldn’t figure out how to speak before a hood was dragged over his head, tied tightly around his neck. Bucky thrashed in the chair, but the restraints on his arms and legs kept him stuck fast.
“Too late.”
One of the guards was dragging Bucky’s covered head back with no regard for the painful angle at which it put his neck, and another was dragging buckets of gray, sloshing water into the room. Steve’s mouth filled with saliva, that awful metallic kind that meant impending nausea. He knew where this was going. He wished it was going anywhere else.
1954
The Soldier sucked in a shaky breath, air suddenly hard to come by through the thick canvas hood fastened around his head. He knew he’d done something bad – at least, he knew his handlers wanted him to feel that he’d done something bad – but part of him still didn’t understand.
It was wrong , what they were forcing him to do. The training courses, the target practice, all preparing him to shape the world the way HYDRA wanted him to. No matter how many times they tried to reprogram him, something deep at the center of his brain kept resurfacing, reminding him he shouldn’t want to do what HYDRA wanted. He couldn’t let them win — he had to fight back.
The Soldier’s head was wrenched backwards, the unnatural angle of his neck sending pain searing down his spine. Ever since the surgery where they’d welded metal to his bones in preparation to attach the arm, his spine had been incredibly sensitive, burning white-hot or aching with pressure when he moved his body in a way the metal enhancements didn’t agree with. They’d told him he’d get used to it. So far, the training they put him through was only serving to make it worse.
Even that pain wasn’t enough to convince him he’d done something badly. That correction didn’t come until the first of the water started splattering over his face.
The Soldier gasped, caught unawares but recognizing the beginning of the punishment. It wasn’t the first time they’d made him drown.
Recovering quickly from that first spluttering gasp, the Soldier drew in as much air as he could, as fast as he could, fighting to keep it in his lungs as the onslaught just kept coming, saturating the cloth above his face with foul-smelling water. His lungs burned with the effort, and he finally had to let the air he’d hoarded go in tiny, choked bursts, fighting the moment when he’d need to breathe in again.
Already knowing what was coming, the Soldier struggled to keep from inhaling for what felt like an eternity, water thundering down against his face as dizziness began to grip him and tiny stars started to fly under the edges of his eyelids. Finally, head spinning, lungs screaming for air, he had to try.
That was always when the panic set in.
The Soldier sucked in a mouthful of cloth so wet that hardly any air was able to seep through it. His chest spasmed with the pressure, diaphragm fighting to pull and pull and pull in air that just wasn’t there. His nose was blocked by the flow of water and impassable, his mouth open in a silent scream around the gag as he gasped for breath, but the position only served to fill his mouth with the taste of the foul water instead.
As the imminence of blacking out started crashing over him, the Soldier found himself fighting again, desperate for escape, body twitching, feet pulling uselessly against the restraints. This was it, he was going to drown, they weren’t going to stop…
The hood was suddenly torn away. The Soldier spluttered and coughed, blinking in the sudden light. The guards kept his head wrenched back at that awful angle, forcing him to fight even harder to clear the water from his airways. He focused on regurgitating the gag, using his tongue and teeth to work it free and spitting it in a wet heap onto the ground. Water still burned against his nose and the back of his throat.
“Are you ready to comply?”
The Soldier wanted to comply – he wanted this to fucking stop – but the Soldier wasn’t alone inside his head. That unnamed force of will inside of him was still screaming no, no, fight this.
God, he was confused. If he could just have a moment to recover between the training and the constant drug infusions and those electricity experiments they did sometimes – if he could just think –
He was forced from that spiral of thought by the sodden hood being dragged over his face again. The Soldier thrashed and fought on instinct, lungs closing prematurely with blind panic, but struggling had never saved him before and it didn’t help him now.
The water splashing over his face and smothering his airways was cold where it soaked the short hair at his scalp and the bare skin of his chest. He shivered as his lungs spasmed in his chest, feeling goosebumps pop up on his skin even as warm tears started leaking down his face under the hood. They weren’t the result of any physical cause, not even the pain gripping his lungs; they were tears of overwhelming, formless terror, flooding his body until he finally just had to let something out.
The water felt endless; the Soldier was sure he must have inhaled more of it than not. His diaphragm ached from pulling for air through the blockage of wet fabric. Time dragged by and he could feel himself blacking out, spinning and floating away on a cloud of hypoxia, and it was all a horrible mixture of terror and relief —
The hood was removed again. The Soldier gasped for air, lungs rattling as he wheezed for breath. He was dragged into a fit of gut-wracking coughs, making it harder to pull in the breath he so desperately needed as his lungs worked to expel water by any means necessary.
“Please,” he rasped the second he had enough air in his lungs to form words. “Ple –” a shuddering gasp – “please…”
During his time with HYDRA (which must have had a start, though he couldn’t quite remember what it was, or why… ) the Soldier had learned just how powerful a tool fear could be. He’d been taught to harness it to his advantage in his potential future work as an operative in the field, but he’d learned the lesson far more effectively during his own conditioning.
There was always that moment during a punishment when the terror grew strong enough to go head-to-head with his conviction. He’d learned, through those moments, that there was no real limit to what fear could become. No matter how strong his willpower was, they could always do things that made fear grow stronger, until it hardly felt like a part of him anymore – just a horrible, animal thing, all-encompassing. An instinct he physically had no power to fight. And now, he’d reached one of those tipping points, where he knew in spite of himself that that raw animal fear was going to win.
The guard holding his chair back to keep the water trickling into his lungs saw it. He locked eyes with the Soldier and the Soldier was sure he knew. They’d beaten him, they’d won. The Soldier would obey.
But the guard simply smiled, teeth sharp and glinting in the light. “Again,” he said. “Until it learns its lesson.”
The Soldier nearly wailed as the hood was tied back on, a pathetic half-swallowed sound escaping in the moment before the fabric sealed over his face. When the water came, steady and unrelenting, the Soldier thought he might have screamed if he’d had the breath. Instead he laid there with his head bent back and took it, desperation clawing at his insides, wondering if finally drowning would be more of a punishment or a relief.
2014
The final round of torture seemed to last an eternity, even to Steve. He couldn’t imagine what it had felt like for Bucky, blind and airless and desperate for so many minutes on end.
When the guards finally removed the hood from Bucky’s head and let go of the chair so it stood upright again, Bucky swayed, unsteady where he sat. He blinked around in a daze, his face pale and drenched like he really had just been pulled out of the water, moments away from drowning. His breath came in horrible, groaning heaves.
One of those heaves for breath seemed to catch on something inside him, and the movement of Bucky’s chest shuddered to a halt, his head dropping to his chest. Steve’s heart pounded, desperate to fix the clear emergency even though he was powerless to do anything but watch.
Bucky started moving again before Steve could work himself into a panic. The wiry muscles of his torso clenched, rolling sickeningly, and Bucky vomited a stream of dirty water down his own bare chest. Even when he was finished and reduced to occasional spasming dry heaves, he kept his head hanging low over his chest, defeated.
“Pathetic,” spat one of the guards, face twisted in clear disgust. Steve didn’t have time to get properly angry with him before his attention was wrenched back to Bucky, who’d started coughing, his lungs crackling with the effort. Every so often a productive cough would bring up a mouthful of mucus-tinged water and Bucky would spit it into the ever-growing puddle on the concrete floor.
“Soldier,” the guard asked him as he coughed, curling in over a chest that must have been aching like hell. “I will ask you again. Are you ready to comply?”
Bucky sniffled between coughs. Steve watched his lower lip tremble, too broken to hide how overwhelmed he felt anymore. Still, he forced some solidity into his voice as he gritted out, laced with grief and guilt, “...yes.”
“What was that?” the guard asked, raising the hood into Bucky’s peripheral vision like he was about to drape it over his head again.
“Yes,” Bucky babbled. “Yes, please, I’m – I’m ready. R-ready to comply.”
“Good,” the guard said, face twisting into that predatory smile. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
Bucky shook as his ankles were freed from their shackles. His hands stayed tied behind his back, offering no way to balance his newly augmented body when it pitched dizzily to the side on its way out of the chair. Bucky managed to stand for half a second before his knees buckled, sending him crumpling to an unsteady kneel in the puddle of water on the ground.
“God. Useless,” one of the guards spat, voice dripping with a derision that made Steve’s blood boil. The guard nodded at his comrades, signaling one of them to take Bucky by the arm. One took hold of Bucky’s metal shoulder, the other his skin-and-bone shoulder. They dragged his shivering, panting body out of the room, leaving a telltale trail of water in their wake.
The video feed was replaced by scrolling text — something about the effectiveness of waterboarding compared with other attempted methods of discipline — but Steve couldn’t bring himself to read it. His gut was churning with nausea, but he was faced with the strange intrusive thought that he didn’t even have the right to be unsettled by it, not when he’d just watched Bucky go through so much worse.
Forcing his stomach into check, Steve let his eyes drift from the television screen to his kitchen table, where a worn manila folder with Bucky’s picture clipped to the front sat waiting. Steve moved towards it, never mind the fact that it was the middle of the night and his eyes were burning with exhaustion.
He’d failed Bucky once. He was part of the reason that tape sitting in his video player existed in the first place. He wasn’t going to let it happen again.
Steve sat down at the table and pulled the folder towards him, no longer willing to let his stomach-turning discomfort about the content within get in his way. Ready to accept every terrible truth, he opened Bucky’s file and kept digging.