Things Floating Like the First Hundred Flakes of Snow
Chapter 3: Can’t Bury the Past
In the summer of 1968, the Winter Soldier manages to break free of his HYDRA programming and get a message to Peggy Carter suggesting that Steve Rogers might be alive. This is what happens next.
(For the @cabigbang 2019. With art by @krycek-asks.)
Here’s a taste—head over to AO3 for the rest!
“I don’t remember falling—I learned that much later,” Bucky said. “I woke up in a medical facility. I didn’t know what happened or how much time had passed or where I was. I couldn’t remember anything about myself. I still had all my knowledge and skills, but my identity was gone, or just—shadows. They spoke to me in Russian and I could understand them well enough, so when they told me my name was Yasha and that I was a HYDRA commando from Siberia and that I’d suffered a head injury, I believed them.”
But he couldn’t shake a growing sense of unease at his situation. The medical research facility was housed in an underground bunker with thick concrete walls and heavy, reinforced steel doors. There wasn’t much to it, just the medical lab, a small classroom where a tutor—they called him a speech therapist—helped him improve his Russian and a gymnasium where a trainer—they called him a physical therapist—taught him how to fight with his new arm. But there were more guards than scientists, some with dogs, all with machine guns.
He knew the technology in his new arm was top secret, but he’d been a soldier long enough to recognize that they were more interested in keeping people in than keeping them out.
“Once I noticed that, I realized I was a prisoner, not a patient. There was only one way out—an elevator behind two steel gates, each one guarded by two soldiers—but it was a way out, and I knew I had to take it.”
All his days were the same, so he simply picked one when he felt particularly well-rested and strong. After breakfast, he beat his Russian tutor to death, took his gun, and made a run for the gates. He killed the first two guards easily and took their keys, got through the first gate and shot the third guard before the fourth shot him with some kind of electrical weapon that paralyzed him.
“I don’t remember what happened after that, but I woke up shackled to my bed.” Bucky swallows hard and clears his throat. “After that, they initiated the indoctrination protocol.”
“Yeah, they beat the hell out of me pretty good,” Bucky says with the kind of rueful familiar grin Peggy would have expected him to make after describing a bar brawl. His nonchalance is awful and false and she tries to clamp down the mounting sense of panic she’s begun to feel about his ordeal. “Starvation, sleep deprivation, electroshock, mind games, and—other things. You know. Anything to make you feel small.”
“Oh, Bucky,” she says, but he just waves her comment away irritably. He doesn’t want her sympathy.
It went on for months, he says—he could tell by how long his hair got. They scrambled his head so badly he didn’t know what was real and what was just the lies they fed him between beatings. They stripped him down, layer by layer, and by the time they were done, he wasn’t even Yasha anymore—they just called him Winter Soldier, because of how he’d been found. He knew, intellectually, that ordinary people did not live the way he did, but it was irrelevant. He was no longer ordinary. He was the Winter Soldier now. The Winter Soldier’s life had always been thus. It was the Winter Soldier’s duty to comply, and nothing else. He was to fight without question, kill without question, obey without question.
Once HYDRA was confident they’d achieved his complete submission, they needed a way to maintain his compliance without compromising his physical fitness. That was where the activation words came in—simple Pavlovian conditioning to remind him how badly they could hurt him if he didn’t follow his orders.
“You never believe you’ll break until you do,” Bucky says, his voice oddly matter-of-fact. “Then you’ll be ashamed of yourself for breaking, and they’ll use that against you, too, because that kind of shame–it’s like acid. It skins you alive and eats through your bones. You’ll do anything to avoid it. So eventually you tell yourself stories to make you think you’re in control. You surrender and tell yourself that you want it. And that’s how they get you.”
“Oh my God, Bucky.” She blinks back tears and fails; she reaches up gingerly with her left hand to wipe them away.
“Don’t you fucking dare pity me, Peg.”
“I don’t,” she says softly. “I care about you. There’s a difference.”
“You care about the man I used to be,” he says stiffly.
“If that man was dead, I would be, too.”
In a movement so quick she can barely process it, he reaches over, grabs the gun out of her hand, and presses it hard against her jaw. “Don’t assume you won’t be before the night is out.”
Peggy lets out her breath slowly, forcing herself to remain calm. “You won’t kill me, Bucky,” she says carefully.
He swallows and nods and then uncocks the gun, fans his fingers away from the trigger, and gently places it back into her waiting hand. “You keep that,” he says gruffly. “Don’t trust me.”
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