Bucharest, Romania
Spring 2016
He was honestly having a tough time keeping his frustration and his disappointment at bay. Which was saying something, really. He was quite used to living with both by this point. Though, admittedly, this was of a different vein than usual.
Usually, it was a matter of him fighting back the familiar feelings of shame and self-reproach and guilt over the horrific things he'd done, frustration at being unable to keep his fluid mind in line and disappointment that he was no further to reaching...what? He honestly didn't know what it was he was ultimately working toward. Oh sure, he had his goals—rebuild his mind, figure out what they'd done to him, track down and...deal with those responsible...to take whatever steps necessary to protect those precious few people he cared for most in his wretched existence—but beyond those?
He knew he would never again be able to have any semblance of a normal life. Not the kind he craved...not like he'd had for however short a time those few astonishing, peaceful months in DC...
...he needed to stop thinking about DC...about everything in DC, really; the Freeway, the Helicarriers, the skinny townhouse and its precious occupant... The churning, pervasive guilt? The aching, crushing feelings of longing? It was not helping him save to taunt him with what he had done and what he could no longer have, threatening his hard won and fragile grasp over his own mind. He knew that. But he couldn't help it. The memories that came after the Helicarriers fell and he'd slipped free from HYDRA's grasp? They were the only comfort he had in his rather cold, grey, tormented existence no matter the regret and remorse still shadowed the memories.
Yet, for all that, they still did not make anything any easier...they just brought along a different kind of pain.
A manageable one...if barely.
No, all he had was the dreary existence he had now and his grim purpose.
And if he was being truly honest with himself? He rather doubted he would have any choice how he would live after...if he even lived long enough to wonder what came after.
But just now, they were providing very little comfort in the face of the potent well of bitter disappointment and the irritable itch of his frustration that currently plagued him. Even the recent revelation that had come on his return from one of his tasks that Bucharest was beginning to almost, almost, feel like 'home' in its familiarity did little to ease the strain on his mind from what felt like a failure.
His mission was not going nearly so well as he had hoped, and his most recent undertaking in pursuit of his larger objective had proven nothing short of a disappointment. Yet another of a growing number of them, as he was slowly being forced to admit.
His goal to track down who and what had made him what he was, to do what he could given his circumstances to atone and amend for what he could—the only way he knew how, of course—and find a measure of closure for what had been done to him and for what he had done, was hitting block after block. Walls and setbacks and dead-ends. As was his mission to rediscover and rebuild not just his past but his own mind. Sure, his memories were beginning to sort themselves back into some semblance of order and there were times, fleeting and brief though they were, where he felt almost human again. But more often than not he just felt...lost. Adrift. Broken.
And after this most recent extension of his larger mission? Harsh, grasping, hungry claws of anger and resentment and despair threatened to undo all the progress he'd made, ripping and tearing at him, trying to drag him back down into the nightmarish mire that had trapped him for so long within his own fractured mind. He had little enough hope as it was, and with each successive failure and setback, a little more of it was eroding away, feeling like it was trying to take the shreds of the sanity he had regained and the fragments of who he was that he was trying to rebuild himself with along with it.
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.
Not that that happened all that often, either.
No. He couldn't do that anymore than he could return to DC. Steve didn't deserve that. Steve didn't deserve to shoulder his problems, his guilt. Really, Steve shouldn't be trying to find him at all. Not after everything he'd done. Not after everything he'd done to Steve. Once more the ghostly image of Steve's face on the Helicarrier wavered to the front of his mind's eye, haunting him, taunting him, the ring of a gunshot echoing in his ears at the memory of Steve crumpling as the bullet hit its mark...
Besides, it was unlikely Steve would be able to do anything to help him anyway.
He would only be a liability. A danger.
No, as much as the lost, hopeless little part of him wanted Steve to find and help him, a much larger, louder, more rational part insisted it was a bad idea. A dangerous idea. He was simply too dangerous.
Staying off the grid and alone and out of everyone's reach was the best option for everyone.
At least until he could be certain that the Winter Soldier could never be activated again...and for that?
He'd needed what had hoped to find within the archives of the base in Austria to even start trying to find a way. He'd needed the documents hidden away there that were no doubt out of his reach, now; his asset intake file and the Red Book; one gone and the path to the other lost to him.
And with it? Any hope that he might, one day, be able to reclaim himself for good.
Clenching his jaw, he forced in breath after long, calming breath, willing his metal hand to relax, the damned limb having groaned faintly as his desperate frustration had swelled, the gleaming fingers fisting tight within their worn leather glove.
And now? He had no idea what to do next. His next moves had depended utterly on finding his file and the Red Book. And as he'd destroyed the memory modification machine hidden away in the DC bank he'd been operating out of in a mindless fit of rage and agony after the Helicarrier? Without it and its accompanying computer systems for activating and controlling his programming? The only source he could think of that remained to him to even get a grasp on what had been done to tear his mind apart was that thrice-damned Red Book. And he had a sickening feeling that he had only one real option left to him. The only place he could conceive of where either the book or his files could be found if either still existed at all.
Siberia.
It was the one place he was absolutely dead set against returning to unless he was faced with no other choice...unless he was truly desperate.
And he feared that day was finally upon him.
He shoved that thought firmly away as well. No, he couldn't admit to himself that he was quite that desperate just yet. Not without considering all his options. Not that there were many. As he'd already discounted, returning to DC or seeking out Steve were very much not options he could even afford to dream about. Beyond that, what other options were there besides going to Siberia?
He needed to regroup, and his tiny apartment here in Bucharest was as good a place as any to do just that. Unknown and utterly off the grid, the defunct HYDRA safehouse obviously hadn't been disturbed in years when he'd first darkened its narrow doorway. Maybe even decades. And in the couple months since he'd arrived in Bucharest, the gungy, disintegrating little apartment had become as close to 'home' as he was ever likely to find again. There was a small comfort to be taken in that.
Not to mention that, sometimes the easiest way to stay hidden while on the run was to stay put. Find somewhere to dig in and lay low while those looking looked right past. Because he knew there were people out there looking for him. People other than Steve. So he'd holed up here in Romania, laying false trails away from his new 'home' throughout Europe even as he'd carried out his mission as best as he was able, as he'd scoured the continent trying to piece together who'd he'd once been and eliminating those responsible for tearing him apart and using him as the horrific weapon he'd been made into.
Maybe he should try again to track down Karpov...if anyone knew about the fate of the Red Book...he might have better luck if he focused on nothing else...
He sighed, adjusting the meagre armful of cans he was waiting in line to purchase as one threatened to slip free.
Only to freeze as his constantly alert senses latched onto the screen above the main counter of the shop he was in.
Everywhere he went the last couple days, just about every screen he'd passed had been plastered with coverage in some degree of some sort of attack or incident in Lagos, Nigeria. Something the Avengers had been involved in. Something Steve had been involved in.
For that reason alone he'd be careful to avoid paying too much attention. Thinking about Steve was hard enough, what with his oldest friend's battered face already haunting his mind's eye, but seeing him? It only made it worse. It left an aching hole in his gut that nearly threatened to overshadow the one already in constant residence in his chest; each a hole the size of Siberia, he thought with a bleak, dark twist of humour.
But that was nothing compared to the feelings of confusion and dismay surging through him as he looked up to the screen now.
Oh, there was still the inescapable weight on his chest from guilt and remorse and the remembered horror twisting his gut that always came with seeing Steve again, even if it was only a video of him. That he was coming to terms with. That he was learning to bear. No, it was whom Steve was with had shaken him.
It was a woman. A painfully familiar woman. A woman he knew he should know...a nearly physical pain crushed in on him, regret and self-loathing constricting around his chest as though everything in him but his mind knew who she was. The stress of it was nearly enough that his tenuous hold on his fluid mind and current state of lucidity nearly broke. He could feel the grasp holding his memories in place—his hold on who he even was—slipping...
Then it hit him with the force of a bullet.
And he knew.
He nearly dropped his armload of cans as he was bombarded with recognition, images and sensations and feelings surging forward with all the force of a tidal wave, threatening to drown him.
It was impossible.
She couldn't be with Steve. She couldn't even be still alive, could she? Dimly he remembered letting her disappear into the night all those years before, battling through his programming to do so. He also remembered the consequences; the brutal punishment and the memory modifications that followed for disobeying his order to dispatch anyone caught trying to leave the facility that night. And he remembered ultimately being forced back to sleep when none of it had been enough; he'd hesitated when they'd tested his recognition of her even after everything they'd put him through to 'correct' his resistance to his programming.
A hard reset they'd called it.
No, they would've never let her get away. They would've hunted her down relentlessly and without mercy for running. His mind might have been a shattered, muddled mess back then that he was still struggling to make sense of now, but that he was absolutely sure of. He knew, just like he knew she'd had no hope of escaping them forever, that, had he not been the one to let her slip away and had the memory modifications taken hold properly, it would've likely been him they sent after her.
His mind had to be playing tricks on him, seeing her face—one of the most prominent of many that haunted him like Steve or the man in the car...the one with he serum; those that were personal in a way all the other faces weren't—imposed on someone else's. Some other woman who just happened to vaguely resemble her. Some other woman with a lithe, dancer's figure beneath her charcoal leather jacket and pale blonde hair.
It wouldn't be the first time.
More than once he'd found himself recoiling in horror as one of the hundreds of faces that haunted him seemed to appear out of a crowd, features grim and eyes blank and accusing, only to vanish as he blinked.
His eyes slammed shut, his chin dropping nearly to his chest as his head shook, striving to banish her face from his mind's eye. She had every right to haunt him, but he couldn't handle seeing her today too. Not on top of everything else. He was already walking a fine line, only barely maintaining his grip over his damaged mind and fluid memories.
A dry sob tore within his chest as he looked up.
She was still there.
She stood next to Steve amid the destruction of whatever had happened in Lagos, speaking quietly with him. Speaking seriously with him...her features carefully controlled, yet, there was concern there, in the way she looked at him and the way her hand reached out to graze against his arm when Steve looked to be avoiding her eye.
She looked nearly as he remembered, the years having been kind...too kind, even. No wonder it had been too easy to think she was a figment of his guilty conscience, a wraith of memory conjured by his fractured psyche to haunt him when she looked nearly as she did all those years ago. Even as overwhelmed by shock and remorse as memory of their history resurfaced to torment him—surprisingly coherent and brutally clear—he could recognize that. It was only as he looked closer, unable to look away, transfixed by seeing her alive and seeing her with Steve, that he was able to pick out the differences beyond the way her hair was done or the style of clothes she wore; a subtle maturity to her features that only the passage of time could produce and a depth of experience visible in her grey eyes that she hadn't had all those years before even after having experienced the kinds of horrors she'd known in that place. Though, some of the harshness he remembered in her then from that place had softened, undoubtedly with distance and time.
But still...it left him feeling uneasy. Could it really have been as long ago as he thought if she still looked so... But no, it had been. The woman he was looking at was very much a woman and not the girl he'd known so long ago, now. There was no denying that. Besides, he'd already settled for himself what felt like ages ago just how long it had been since those weeks training the girls in the Red Room.
It had taken a great deal of time, but he'd eventually placed how Black Widow had seemed familiar to him; not only because of a mission in Odessa years back, but because he remembered her as the other girl from that place. The little redheaded shadow that had helped take him down that single time he'd been beaten during his time there.
They had been close. He remembered that.
Just as he knew that, though time had similarly been kind to the redheaded operative, he knew it had indeed passed thanks to his encounters with her. She'd been a child when she'd encountered him in the Red Room. And she was now a woman grown, just as she had been in 2009, when she'd been the one protecting the scientist he'd been tasked to eliminate...and really, he should have eliminated her too, that day...he still wasn't entirely sure why he hadn't...though, looking up to the familiar, impossible blonde up on the television screen, he suddenly had a suspicion to that end itching at the back of his thoughts...that it came back to her...some kind of atonement for what he had done...for what he had put that poor young woman through all because his mind had been too scrambled to control his most basic impulses...what kind of monster was he...
He was jolted out of his anguished reverie by a dull, metallic thud.
One of his cans had fallen from the precarious stack cradled in the crook of his elbow.
He swallowed thickly, surreptitiously glancing around before slowly lowering himself down to retrieve the escaped can. And he honestly felt every inch like he was the hundred years old he technically was.
She was certainly someone he'd never expected to see again save when she haunted his dreams—and sometimes his waking hours—just as did so many other faces...faces of those he'd killed...of those he'd wronged...
And he saw her frequently...almost as frequently as he saw Steve's broken, swollen features and the anguish and horror he imagined his family would've felt had they ever learned what he'd become...and Iris...
He shook his head as he straightened, feeling like every joint should've creaked with how stiff and weary and utterly sick he suddenly felt.
Yes, she haunted him just as Steve's bloodied, sorrowful features from that day on the Helicarrier did...or how Iris' broken sobs echoed in his mind or how her bright, certain hazel eyes bored into him whenever he closed his own.
But with her? He always saw her edging away from him afterward, panting and painfully conflicted...or the wide-eyed, bewildered look on her desperate features, tears beginning to spill over onto her pale cheeks as he let her go, not understanding what he was doing. He saw the cold, blank look on her face—gut-wrenchingly close to how he imagined he had looked when trapped by his programming...hard, emotionless, ruthless...as she was ordered to face him in training again and again, never hesitating despite knowing she could never beat him.
Save that one time, of course.
The corner of his lip tugged.
Yes, he supposed that, if anyone in that place would've been likely to make it out, it would've been her. There had been something...special about her. Some...spark that hadn't been doused by that place.
And now she was working with Steve and she looked...not happy, given the circumstances, of course, but like she...like she had found somewhere she fit in if her ease with Steve was any clue. That was good. He inhaled deeply as a tiny, warm feeling of relief flickered to life amid the crushing remorse.
Though he wasn't sure anything would've ever happened between them in another life, despite his programming he had come to care for her in a small way back then—still did in a strange, indefinable way, if he was being honest. Thrown together as they had been by the whims of those controlling them, something more had grown. There had been a connection there, something more than just the physical pull between them. It hadn't been love, no. Not by any means. He really had no idea what it was. Kinship perhaps? A mutual...not respect, but something in that vein. He couldn't really put a name to it beyond that something unexpected had been forged between them. Not fragmented as his mind was. Something deeper than simple attraction. A tenderness despite the raw passion they had escaped into in each other's company. A sympathy for each other and each other's need to...to escape.
All he knew for sure was that, the night he'd caught her running, he hadn't been able to bring himself to kill her, programming be damned.
And seeing her now? Alive and safe and working with his oldest friend...that she was friends with his best friend? Hopefully having found some measure of peace after everything that had happened all those years ago?
He would do it again in a heartbeat.
A/N: Thanks for Reading!
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