I stirred. My head was throbbing. The mattress below me was stiff. I was tucked under a thin blanket and wearing loose, lightweight, staticky material. The fabric of the blanket and the clothes smelled clean—surgically, chemically so. It was all familiar. All of this hit me at once, and I shot up, looking around for Rumlow coming to wake me up.
Then I remembered.
"Hey roomie." Colin was laying on top of an identical twin bed on the other side of a small, dimly lit concrete room. He sat up when I looked at him, swinging his legs onto the ground and leaning his elbows onto his knees.
I wrinkled my nose, palm against my aching head. "Ugh." My mouth was so dry that I didn't want to open it to speak properly.
"I tried to tell you to lean on me."
"Where's my mom?" I asked hoarsely. "Is she okay?"
"I don't know, Grace. Why did you leave the Avengers Tower?"
"Fuck off, dude. Obviously I regret doing that now. Where are we?"
"Do you really think I would know? If I knew where this base was, do you really think I wouldn't have dropped you a hint when I left you that picture of your mom?"
I didn't say anything, and he continued. "I have something for you. A peace offering. For calling you a bitch. I was very stressed, you gotta understand." He dug something out from between his mattress and bed frame and stood up.
I winced at his lanky outline in the darkness, made worse by the hoodie he had on, hood up, over his prison uniform. "Oh my god, don't stand over me like that. You look so fucking creepy. Turn the overhead light on. You look like the grim reaper."
"Suck it up. I'm trying to give you something."
He came over and extended a closed fist toward me, and I held my hands out. Bucky's dog tags clinked into my palms. "They would've taken them from you if they'd found them," Colin said. "So don't get caught with them."
"Thank you," I said, actually touched. I closed my hand around them, as if that would be enough to conceal them. I wished I had a pocket to put them in.
He was already across the room, flicking the overhead light on. I blinked thickly as the harsh light pierced through my headache. Maybe having them off wouldn't have been that bad, I thought.
"I should tell you the reason I found them is because you were half-conscious and they were gonna have someone make you change into the latest prisoner-chic outfit as soon as you started being able to stand up. I said I'd do it, 'cause I thought you'd rather it was me than a HYDRA goon. 'Cause you at least sort of trust me—
"I don't, actually—"
"—And we share that little bit of Zola DNA, so we're family. I still feel gross about it, though, so I'm sorry. You tried to bite me a lot."
"Ew. Don't say we're family. We've made out."
"It's a small percentage. Like, very distant cousins. I actually worked it out."
"I'm gonna throw up."
"Keep it on your side of the room."
"Is that a bathroom?" I asked, nodding to a closed door and walking toward it weakly.
"Yeah. Pretty nice for being held captive. A lot better than the shitholes I was staying in on the run. They're giving us the special Zola legacy treatment—"
I shut the bathroom door behind me, ignoring his muffled voice as he continued to speak. It was tiny, the size of an airplane bathroom, with the addition of a little shower. Just like last time.
I gulped down water straight from the faucet until it was sloshing around in my empty stomach. I brushed my teeth, pausing to frown at the new toothbrush and wondering how Rumlow had managed to stab Bucky with one.
"Do you have anything metal that I could make into a blade?" I asked Colin as I came out of the bathroom and sat back down on the bed.
"You're not making a shiv, Grace."
"Why not?"
"You'll get yourself in trouble. And they won't kill you at first, they'll just wipe your memories."
"Again, why not? Why won't they kill me?"
"Well, they won't kill you unless you really act up. A lot and consistently. Like the other 'me' you saw in the elevator footage. They can make more of us, but it'll take years for them to grow up, so they generally don't want us dead."
"But some of them do want us dead."
Colin snickered. "You heard this from Rumlow, right? I bet he made it sound super dramatic."
"It's literally life or death."
"Well, yeah. We keep acting up so bad that half of HYDRA thinks we're not worth having around. They can't electrocute the absolute hell out of us like they'd need to to make us listen, 'cause they don't wanna wreck our fucking shit the way they did to your favorite homicidal—"
"Back up and choose your words more carefully, please," I interrupted tiredly. He didn't have a banjo for me to kick over this time.
"Sorry. They can't guarantee our unwavering compliance, because that would require methods of the same intensity as those used on the Wint—"
"No."
"On you-know-who," he amended, rolling his eyes. "Since the whole point is for us to carry on with Zola's exact cognition, his reasoning, his thought processes, they can't make us completely clean slates. We have to be able to think for ourselves, even if they decide to take away our concrete memories. Free thought makes us liabilities. A lot of them think it's a disgrace to Zola's name to let us keep existing. But the bright side is that the ones that have us now are the ones that believe in second chances. Isn't that nice?"
"What do they want from us? They already recreated the serum."
"They've got me doing all their hacking. You know, like what I did in the prison. No idea what they want from you. But yeah, can you believe it about the serum? One of the me's must have done that. You know that means that if you or I had gone into biochem, we could've done that ourselves? We should never have been engineers."
"I went into engineering because of Tony Stark. How did you do it?" I asked. "Did you know about this the whole time? Or did you—"
"No, they picked computer engineering for me. I was raised on a base like this. They needed somebody to do computer shit. Funny story about what I knew this whole time, though. You know how I talk? Yeah, I can't keep a secret. So they wiped me of everything except the years they sent me out to get an education, and they got me a job in the Avengers Tower so I could hack Stark's shit once they needed me to.
"I didn't know anything until the night they faked my death, when they started giving me orders. I still had free will and all, and I was really confused, so I helped them get into the Tower. I wasn't the one that shot anybody, by the way. I just left the note and dragged the body. Then you can only imagine the speed at which I booked it the fuck out of NYC. Then the memories started coming back while I was on the run. When they caught up with me, I smashed the hell out of the computer that had access to Stark's shit. Are you starting to see why some of them think we're annoying to keep around?"
I nodded. He kept talking.
"So, anyway, moral of the story is that while I worked there, if you'd liked me enough to ask me anything about myself, you probably would've figured out something was up. I had a story they'd fed me, that I believed was true, but I didn't have real memories."
"That's not even close to the moral of the story. And you never asked me about myself either."
"That's just because I like to hear myself talk. I really did like you."
"Whatever."
"And no," he added quickly. "The irony of mind-wiped me telling you to stay away from the Winter Soldier is not lost on me."
"I told you to stop calling him that."
"Don't let anybody around here catch you not calling him that. Probably best not to mention him at all. But for the record, I think I might've hated him so much because my subconscious was screaming something at me."
I still had his dog tags closed in my hand. I ran my thumb over them. The motion was soothing; it reminded me of a worry stone that I used to keep in my hoodie pocket throughout high school.
I needed more answers.
"Why'd they fake your death?" I asked. "Why'd they leave that note for me?"
"You know how Rumlow stirs shut up? He was doing it the whole time he was out of prison. SHIELD had him trying to track down the other me's, the other two with me on the elevator. Only SHIELD just knew they were scientists. Didn't know what they looked like."
"That's why he was out of prison?"
"Yeah. He was supposed to be finding these geniuses who supposedly recreated the serum. And he did. But he didn't fucking tell SHIELD. He wanted to start using the clones again, got everything stirred up, got half of HYDRA really interested in wanting us dead again. So when one of my brother clones started trying to sell the serum that they were transporting—that's what got him killed. Three birds, one stone. Kill him, get you under protection, get me out of public by faking my death. Then once they had me back in the facility, they were ready to focus on getting you back too."
There was a long pause while I processed.
"Do you know what time it is?" I asked stiffly.
"Um, no. Sometime late at night, like 2 or 3. That's all I know. Another funny story. They had an analog clock in here, and it kept ticking, and I got a little antsy yesterday and smashed it and tried to off myself with a sharp piece of it. Didn't think that one through. Sorry. I didn't know I was gonna get a room mate who'd want to have it."
I frowned, suddenly realizing that Colin wasn't as indifferent to the situation as he was acting. "Hey—" I said gently, getting up, intending to sit on his bed next to him. I stopped when he stood up, dodging away from me.
"What are you doing?" he asked, both of us standing in the middle of the room, staring at each other.
"I was gonna comfort you," I said uncertainly.
"Don't. Don't wallow in it. Just accept it. Trust me, I grew up like this. Fight a little, so you can tell yourself you tried, and then do what they say. It's easier."
He went to the bathroom, shutting the door behind him, just to get further away from me. I sat back down, cross legged on my own bed. I opened my hands and stared down at the dog tags, thumb rubbing over and over and over the ridges of Bucky's name.
A/N: do y'all want a face claim for Colin? And if so, any ideas? I can't think of one. Evan Peters keeps coming to mind, but he's part of the MCU now so I can't use him 😭😭😭