Forgotten | Bucky Barnes

Extra Assignment

Staring at the computer screen before me in boredom, I took a sip of my coffee. An endless amount of columns filled with numbers were shining back into my face, and endless amounts of numbers waiting for me to sort through them and find any abnormalities.

After weeks of treating minor wounds and assisting with operations, this seemed like a nice change of pace, and at first, it was. But after five days of staring at a screen, it had already gotten rather tiresome. I rubbed my eyes, a small sting reminding me that the blue bruises below it hadn't fully healed yet. At least my nose had stopped hurting without external pressure about two days ago. With a deep sigh, I lifted my coffee mug for another sip, hoping the coffee would help clear the fog of numbers from my mind and help me concentrate, just for me to realize it was empty.

With another deep sigh, I stretched my arms and stood up to go and get another coffee. Walking past a few rooms with researchers that seemed just as tired as I was, one of them being Doctor Akimov who was brooding over the data I had already organized for him, I reached the coffee machine. As the machine loudly started to grind the coffee and made me worry about the arrival of a new headache, I smiled to myself. This was extremely tiresome, but it reminded me of my time at university, of the long evenings of going through the data we had recorded from the rats that Akimov had experimented on. Then a picture of one of the deformed corpses flashed briefly in my mind, wiping the smile off my face again. Looking at my halfway filled coffee mug, I impatiently tapped my finger against the machine. The faster I got back to my work table, the faster I could drown out the memory with numbers again.

The data of course came directly from the experiments, but thanks to the months I had spent helping Doctor Akimov at university, I found it rather easy to lose myself in the numbers. My previous experience turned out to be rather useless however, since most of it had been recorded after Hydra had done their bit of experimenting on the subjects as well. To put it simply, my task of picking out the abnormalities caused by Akimovs experiments turned into finding the specific abnormalities caused by Akimov out of a sea of abnormal measurements.

Taking my finally filled mug from the coffee machine, I went back to our room and sat back down, continuing to scroll through the numbers. Thankfully, the abnormalities caused by Hydra tended to be in the same places, so I had already started figuring out which data was actually interesting and helpful for Doctor Akimov.

And, maybe, I would get a chance at trying to figure out what Hydra was using for their experiments after we were done going through the results of the last experiment. Much to both my and Akimovs annoyance, we weren't told a thing about Hydras experiments, even though they could potentially influence Doctor Akimovs experiments as well.

It certainly made sense for Hydra to be careful about what information they gave us, the Doctor also hadn't been given any additional information about the winter soldier, the layout of this base or any operations and missions going on, but refusing information that was necessary for him to do his job was impractical at best, and possibly deadly for the test subjects at worst.

Once again an image of the experiments appeared in my mind, and I decisively shook my head and went back to work.

My work was soon interrupted again, not because of a lack of coffee, but by a knock on the doorframe of the room. Looking up from the screen, I saw one of the Hydra researchers staring back at me with disdain..

"Hello. What do you want?" I said. The Hydra researchers weren't as sociable as the medics I worked with upstairs, at least not towards me and Dr. Akimov. They seemed to be very devoted to Hydra and barely said anything in our presence, likely to avoid spilling any potentially important information.

"We need a few blood samples to be drawn from the winter soldier. As everyone else is busy here, it will be your task." the researcher answered, proving my assumption that she was only here and talking to me because she needed me to do something right.