The Ghost [Marvel | Steve Rogers]

Chapter 15

The old HYDRA base in the Austrian Alps was supposed to be completely off-record. That was something he remembered clearly. It had taken time and delving into some of the most painful and fractured memories he possessed—not to mention falling back on a few of the more reprehensible skills he had learned as the Winter Soldier to extract the information he'd needed—but he had eventually come to determine that it was likely the place he'd first operated out of. And once he'd been moved to Siberia sometime in the sixties, he was fairly certain it had been converted to a secure records depository.

One that, officially speaking, didn't exist either...just as he once hadn't existed. A facility where he had been so certain the answers he'd craved had been held.

Well, there was no telling now.

It had been completely empty. Gutted.

There had been nothing left. Nothing that could help him on his mission to reclaim his past or who he'd been. Nothing that could help him find those responsible he hadn't managed to eliminate yet. Nothing that could help him safeguard the world and those he cared about against what he was.

Just...nothing.

Nothing save the return of a handful of disjointed, tormenting splinters of memory that did little but serve to remind him how he'd been torn apart and pieced back together into a twisted, corrupted version of the man he'd used to be. Memories from his earliest days as the Winter Soldier, when his programming had still been new and had yet to wholly take hold. Nightmarish memories where he'd still had fleeting, torturous moments of clarity, when who he'd been had clawed its way to the surface only to howl with revulsion and horror and misery at the monster they'd made him into. Brief, flickering moments when he'd been horrifically aware of what was happening to him.

Memories from when a small, determined part of him had still been fighting tooth and nail to retain even a fragment of who he'd been, futile as it had been to even try.

There had been nothing left at the Austria Base for him. Nothing usable. Not even his dog tags. Those he remembered last seeing there, certain he dimly remembered them being pulled from his neck and filed away.

He'd hoped...that having something tangible...

It had been a foolish hope, like hoping that there would be something left at an obviously defunct base.

Only the equipment and fixtures too large to be moved had remained. Fixtures, old desks and empty cabinets.

If there had ever even been anything there for him to find once he'd been moved to Siberia, it was long gone. Destroyed by HYDRA decades before or taken to be secured somewhere else lest they risk any of it falling into the wrong hands.

Either way, someone had torn the base apart. Likely whoever had taken everything. Probably, if he was any judge—debatable, of course—after what had happened in DC, when the Winter Soldier had been revealed to the world and the Helicarriers had fallen from the sky. Because, for all that there was no sign of life to be had at the abandoned base, it had not been abandoned all that long. Detritus that belonged to the current decade lingered in corners and the dust didn't lay quite thick enough over everything to have been gathering for even a few months, much less a few decades.

Not that it really mattered one way or another.

He forced himself to relax as a wave of bitterness and resentment threatened.

And not for the first time, he wondered if he should, perhaps, go to Steve. To seek him out. To stop running.

To let Steve help him.

But he was at once violently shoving the very idea aside as he had done a hundred, a thousand times before. Nearly every time he was a lucid as he was today, really.